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Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Aptina Applies for EDoF Patent

Aptina's EDoF patent application US20090297056 was published on Dec. 3, 2009:

Method and Apparatus for Extended Depth-of-Field Image Restoration
Lelescu, Dan (Morgan Hill, CA, US)
Mullis, Robert (Soquel, CA, US)
Rao, Pravin (San Jose, CA, US)
Venkataraman, Kartik (San Jose, CA, US)
Lu, Cheng (Santa Clara, CA, US)
Chen, Junqing (San Jose, CA, US)

Filed: 05/28/2008

Primarily algorithmic-based application talks about trade-offs between a quality of focusing and a depth of focus.

Aptina's EDoF approach is also presented in SPIE conference paper.

As a side note, two of the inventors - Kartik Venkataraman and Robert Mullis left Micron in March 2008 to found Pelican Imaging together with Aman Jabbi, a former Head of video technologies at Micron. They were able to raise $7M in round A financing in August 2009 - quite an achievement these days.

The new company is developing "computational cameras that can manipulate static, 2D images through three dimensions". The company site says: "At Pelican Imaging, we introduce a fundamental shift towards "software cameras" and address the challenges posed by conventional camera design, small pixels and the megapixel race. Pelican's technology will result in superior photographs & video, with new and exciting features and applications."

6 comments:

  1. Nny idea what they mean by "through 3 dimensions"?

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  2. My guess is they mean a temporal noise filtering in the video stream. So 3rd dimension is time. These days it's quite a popular technique implemented in may camcorders and also as stand-alone chips, such as Oki's. Just google for "3d noise reduction".

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  3. Will this have any effect on their talks with DxO !!

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  4. Aptina's application was filed more than 1.5 years ago, while DxO talks started much after that. So, I'd guess the effect is already factored in.

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  5. If one wanted to contact the author of this blog directly about this and other issues, how would you go about doing this? Your contact information is not available in the left-hand nav.

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  6. Actually, my mail is listed in profile, if you scroll to the bottom of the left-hand column.

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