Toshiba Light Field Camera Module to have 2 to 6 MP Resolution

TechHive: Toshiba showed its recently announced light field camera to IDG News Service at its research laboratory in Kawasaki, just outside of Tokyo. The camera module measures about 8mm on each side of its cubical shape. It currently uses a 8MP image sensor to produce images with a resolution of 2MP at 30fps speed. "We use much of the data not for resolution, but for determining distance," said Hideyuki Funaki, a researcher at Toshiba. A future version of the module will use a 13MP sensor to produce light-field images with 5 or 6 MP resolution.

Toward production of the new camera modules sometime in 2014, Toshiba is working to improve its algorithms, to attain better speed and distance accuracy as well as lessen the load on a phone’s central processor.

The image from Toshiba light field camera shows the distance of
two dolls by color, with the scale marked in millimeters

Update: Toshiba Review, Oct. 2012 published a paper on this camera (in Japanese).