Pelican Imaging Corporation announced that it has developed the first prototype array camera for mobile devices. In addition, the company has announced its Technical Advisory Board that is comprised of three leading experts in computational imaging. The members are Dr. Marc Levoy, Dr. Shree K. Nayar and Dr. Bedabrata Pain.
The Technical Advisory Board leverages several decades of experience in helping guide Pelican Imaging‘s pioneering work building the industry’s thinnest high-resolution camera, targeting smartphones and tablets.
“We are excited about attracting some of the foremost experts to Pelican’s Technical Advisory Board. This relationship gives us a collaborative forum that leverages their unique insights and maximizes the potential of our architecture,” said Kartik Venkataraman, CTO and co-founder of Pelican Imaging.
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 smartphones. 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.
Dr. Marc Levoy, professor at Stanford University commented, “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 Edict Inc.