Refocusable Image Generation via Multi-Focal Capture and Contrast Analysis
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing consumer products that enable refocusable images, or 'living pictures,' require proprietary hardware, making them expensive and limiting their availability to mobile devices.
Innovation Solution
A mobile device camera captures a series of images with varying focal lengths, aligned using motion sensor data, and processed to determine the highest contrast regions, allowing users to select and display refocused portions of the image without specialized hardware.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If proprietary hardware is used to enable refocusable image functionality, then refocusable images can be produced, but the cost becomes expensive
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces specialized optical hardware with a software-based image processing system. A camera captures multiple images at different focal lengths, and software algorithms select and composite the sharpest regions from each image to create a refocusable image, eliminating the need for expensive proprietary refocusable lens hardware.
Solution Approach 2:
The system pre-captures multiple images at different focal lengths before the user views the final image. This preliminary capture of multiple focal length variations allows the software to later select the optimal focus regions without requiring specialized hardware during the viewing phase.
2Ease of operation
If proprietary hardware is used to enable refocusable images, then interactive image viewing is achieved, but availability to mobile devices is limited
Solution Approach 1:
The patent makes refocusable image functionality universal by implementing it through standard mobile device components (camera, processor, display) rather than specialized hardware. This software-based approach allows any mobile device with a standard camera to produce refocusable images, greatly expanding availability while maintaining interactive viewing capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of requiring expensive proprietary hardware to create refocusable images, the system uses software to copy and recombine focal information from multiple standard camera images, effectively creating a virtual refocusable image that behaves like hardware-based solutions but runs on conventional mobile devices.
3Adaptability or versatility
If multiple images are captured with varying focal lengths, then refocusable functionality is enabled, but image processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the image into multiple regions and evaluates focus quality independently for each region across multiple captured images. By segmenting the image processing task, the system can efficiently determine which focal length captures each region best without requiring complex global optimization, reducing overall processing complexity while maintaining refocusable functionality.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments of the present invention are directed toward providing refocusable image. Refocusable images are images that, after being captured, can be refocused, or adjusted to have a different focal length. The embodiments described herein can utilize a mobile user device, such as a smartphone, without the need for specialized hardware. A camera of the mobile device can be configured to take a series of images in succession over a short period of time in which the focal length of the camera is varied so that each image has a different focal length. An image stack is created by aligning the images, and images are processed to determine which image has the highest contrast (i.e., is in focus) for each region of the image stack. Embodiments can further include displaying a first image of the series of images.