Autonomous camera

Improving video photography

Difficulty of controlling video in smartphones

Smartphones are designed to be touch operated from the display. This ubiquitous feature of smartphones brings presents an operational detriment when capturing videos. Typically shooting a smartphone video requires both hands to hold the phone and point it stably at the scene. People have a limited number of hands and fingers with which to adjust focus, zoom or other controls while also holding and pointing the smartphone. Moving around while shooting requires even more attention away from the smartphone.

Smartphone cameras have for some time been able to deal autonomously with the so-called 3A:     Auto-focus, Auto-white balance and Auto-exposure. Corephotonics is working to develop software and hardware enhancements to enable an extended range of autonomous features. Such enhancements are aimed to make video capture effortless and the captured videos more informative and less erratic.

Improving stills photography

Multiple cameras, single take

In 2016-2017 dual aperture cameras were introduced in smartphones. Since then, the average number of cameras in smartphones is increasing, commonly reaching three and four cameras. Typically, smartphones entertain an ultra-wide camera, a standard wide camera and one or two tele cameras for zoom photography. It is the common practice in the camera application that one specific camera is selected according to the user selected zoom factor and the resulting still image is captured from this selected camera.

Corephotonics is working to develop hardware and software enhancements to enable autonomous capturing of multiple shots from one or multiple cameras which may be combined to a small but interesting collection or collage of still images, uncovering interesting content within the scene, which may be beyond the attention of the photographer.

Image quality

Image quality testing
UI/UX testing
Testing benchmark design and integration

Camera hardware

Compact Lens design
Micro electro-mechanical systems for zoom, auto-focus, optical image stabilization
Diverse actuator technologies and control systems
Environmental and reliability testing in preparation for ultra high volume Manufacturing

Computer Vision

Deep Computer Vision models for: scene understanding, object detection and recognition and tracking; classification; depth analysis
Stereo vision and depth mapping
Image fusion
Dynamic multi aperture calibration
Heterogeneous computing (MT CPU, GPU, DSP, unified-memory architecture)
Mobile camera software architecture
UI/UX design for camera applications