The need of process and quality control in many industrial fields is requiring the development of optical sensors taylored for specific applications. These sensors must be potentially low cost and possibly should integrate on the same die signal processing capabilities. Standard CMOS technology is therefore the technology to choose for satisfying these requirements. Two examples of application specific vision sensor are presented in this paper. The first is a focal plane array with very high dynamic range for the automotive industry, and the latter is a linear array with on board processing for a triangulation based 3D laser scanne