Mountain View, CA--Pelican Imaging Corporation, a venture-backed computational imaging company, announced that it has developed what it says is the first prototype array camera for mobile devices. In addition, the company has announced its Technical Advisory Board comprised of three leading experts in computational imaging. The members are Professor Marc Levoy, Professor Shree K. Nayar and Dr. Bedabrata Pain. The Technical Advisory Board leverages several decades of experience in helping guide Pelican Imaging‘s camera, targeting smart phones and tablets.
Pelican Imaging has developed a computational camera array architecture and fundamental intellectual property with 12 pending patent applications in array optics, sensors, and image reconstruction algorithms. Pelican’s camera improves upon image and video quality while allowing for thinner smart phones. New applications are also enabled by introducing features such as 3-D depth, gesture control, and the ability for users to interact with the image before and after capturing the shot.
Professor Marc Levoy of Stanford University said, "Pelican’s technology has the potential to upset the traditional tradeoff between the sensitivity and resolution of a camera and its thickness. It also brings new capabilities to cameras, including post-capture focusing, foveal imaging and programmable frame rates. 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. Pelican’s solution is small, fast and inexpensive--which makes it a very exciting technology."
"Pelican's architecture relaxes key pixel design constraints, thereby enhancing pixel performance beyond those in legacy cameras. I am equally excited about its potential for early and cost-effective adoption of new sensor technologies. The next generation of mini- and micro-cameras is upon us," said Dr. Bedabrata Pain, CEO of technology consulting firm Edict Inc.
SOURCE: Pelican Imaging; www.pelicanimaging.com/pelican-unveils.htm
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.