Toshiba Announces Multi-Frame Image Processing Technology

Toshiba Corporate R&D announces "a super high quality image processing technology that achieves image quality comparable to that of larger image sensors." The number of pixels in image sensors has been increasing year by year. However, the size of image sensors has not changed and this leads to increase of noise in the image because the amount of light received per pixel decreases as the pixel count increases. The long time exposure reduces image noise, but the image quality suffers due to camera shake. Conventionally, electronic image stabilization technology has been used to prevent image quality deterioration. In electronic image stabilization, several copies of the image are overlaid to compensate for the noise and a large amount of parallel memory is required to hold the multiple image copies. As a consequence, the noise reduction effect is limited by the number of image copies that can be kept in memory.

Toshiba has developed the processing technology significantly reducing noise and preventing camera shake without requiring a large amount of memory. This technology is said to generate a very sharp image with less noise by overlaying many continuously recorded images. The image is sequentially generated using the memory capacity required for just a single image. This new technology is said to effectively and precisely detect everything from tiny vibrations to large camera shake. Random noise is said to be canceled out by overlaying multiple images, and object edges are kept clear and crisp through the same process. The increase in the number of captured images makes it possible to obtain very high image quality using very little memory for storage. In particular, the technology is said to enable the users to produce extremely clear images at low light conditions.