Pelican Imaging's "array camera" will mean thiner devices, and new imaging tricks.
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The next generation of smartphone cameras might actually be 25 cameras rolled into one. A company called Pelican Imaging
recently announced it had developed the first prototype "array camera"
for mobile devices. Instead of using one lens, Pelican uses an array of
multiple lenses; it combines all the data from these multiple viewpoints
and then builds a single high-quality image.
Since it uses software to
process the image, this is sometimes called "computational imaging."
Why does the invention matter? Here's one very simple reason: it
could cut down on the width of your iPhone 7, say, or other smartphone
of the future. More intriguingly, though, the computational approach
allows all sorts of interesting manipulations. It enables "foveal imaging,"
for one, a type of focus that more closely mimics how the eye actually
sees. And it could even give you the ability to alter the focus of an
image after the image has been taken.
(Outlets from CNET to Engadget have been drooling over that one, in particular.)
Pelican Imaging was founded in 2008
and has received $17 million in venture funding to date from investors
like Globespan Capital Partners, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners,
and IQT, according
to CrunchBase. And it has a truly stellar supporting cast, in the form
of three recently-announced members of its technical advisory board.
Marc Levoy, a computer science professor at Stanford, co-designed the
Google book scanner and helped launch Google Street View;
Shree Nayar of
Columbia co-directs that university's Vision and Graphics Center and
its Computer Vision Laboratory; Bedabrata Pain, CEO of technology
consulting firm Edict Inc., co-invented active pixel sensor technology
that helped inspire today's mobile phone cameras.
For Levoy, Pelican's prototype is exciting because it miniaturizes a
type of technology already proven on the larger scale: "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," he said
in a release. "Pelican's solution is small, fast and inexpensive -
which makes it a very exciting technology." Nayar goes so far as to call
Pelican's technology a "paradigm shift in imaging and video" likely to
"bring computational imaging applications to the mass market."
But it's not just people on Pelican's payroll who are shilling for
the novel protoype. Om Malik at GigaOm thinks that the new array camera
helps explode what he calls
"the megapixel myth"--the notion that "the more megapixels we have on
our mobile phone camera, the Pelican 1510-004-110 Medium Carry-On Case with Padded Dividers
better our photos will be." A higher number
of smaller lenses may be the real path forward--making Pelican's new
camera more than the sum of its parts.
better our photos will be." A higher number
of smaller lenses may be the real path forward--making Pelican's new
camera more than the sum of its parts.source: http://www.technologyreview.com