Pelican Imaging believes its array camera technology will mean slimmer smartphones that still have high-resolution cameras. (Credit: Pelican Imaging)
In academic circles, light-field photography is nothing new. Now, though, a start-up called Pelican Imaging has unveiled a prototype of the technology geared to improve mobile-phone cameras.
Light-field photography--and the related concept of a plenoptic camera -- is a complicated concept involving an array of small images rather than one large one. Essential to the process is computational image processing that can extract an actual photograph from the jumble of raw data.
And not just any image, but several images. Light-field photography captures enough data that a person can adjust focus after the shot has been taken and perform actions such as setting a shallow depth of field to blur out backgrounds or the opposite to make both the foreground and background of a landscape sharp.
Pelican, though, has a less exotic sales pitch that's probably better suited to phone makers and the casual snapshooters who tend to use phones for taking pictures: a thinner phone.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced today that it's built a prototype of its camera, which it boasts is "the industry's thinnest high-resolution camera, targeting smartphones and tablets."
"Pelican's technology has the potential to upset the traditional tradeoff between the sensitivity and resolution of a camera and its thickness," Levoy said in a statement. "We have been investigating these aspects of computational photography in our laboratory at Stanford for a number of years, through the Stanford Multi-Camera Array, which is big, slow, and expensive. Pelican's solution is small, fast, and inexpensive--which makes it a very exciting technology."
[ Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031227-264.html#ixzz1JGmeczbs ]
[ Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20031227-264.html#ixzz1JGlfOYyD ]
[ by Stephen Shankland ]
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