Samsung Patents a Refrigerator Camera That Reads the Room Before You Open the Door
Built-in refrigerator cameras are only as useful as the photos they take, and bad lighting kills both. Samsung's new patent tackles the…
243 filings · topic
Camera patents
How phones and headsets see: image sensors, lenses, autofocus tricks, and the processing that turns light into photos. We track every camera filing as it publishes.
Recent filings
243 total
Apple Patents a Tiny Light Projector That Maps Surfaces With Precise Dot Patterns
Apple has filed a patent for a new kind of light projector that uses ultra-thin optical surfaces, engineered at the nanometer scale,…
Apple Patents a Prism-Tilting Camera System for Thinner Optical Zoom
Apple's latest patent describes a compact camera that bends light around a corner using a prism, then tilts that prism to keep…
Samsung Patents a Compact Camera Lens Design That Makes Phone Zoom Thinner
Getting a powerful zoom lens into a phone without a chunky camera bump is one of the trickiest problems in phone design.…
Apple Patents a New Way to Seal and Mount Rear Cameras Inside a Glass Bump
Apple is rethinking how cameras attach to the glass back of a phone, using a molded plastic seal and a metal trim…
Samsung Patents a Five-Lens Camera Stack With Tightly Controlled Spacing
Samsung has filed a patent for a five-lens camera design where the physical gaps between specific lenses must fall within a precise…
Sony Patents a System for Teaching Cameras to See Colors They Can't Directly Measure
Most camera sensors can only measure a handful of color wavelengths at once, which means they're always guessing at the full picture.…
Sony Patents a Depth Sensor That Scans a Scene in Both Directions to Map It in 3D
Sony has filed a patent for a depth sensor that deliberately sweeps a light beam in opposite directions and then averages the…
Sony Patents a Camera Lens System That Keeps Focus Sharp While You Zoom
Zooming in on a subject sounds simple, but keeping it in sharp focus while you zoom is one of the trickier engineering…
Sony Patents a System That Fills In Missing Color Data From Basic Light Sensors
Most camera sensors only capture a handful of color channels, throwing away most of the light information that actually hit them. Sony…
Qualcomm Patents a Camera Sensor Trick for Capturing Bright and Dark Scenes at Once
Taking a photo in a room with a bright window behind your subject almost always ends badly. Qualcomm's new patent targets exactly…
Qualcomm Patents a Fingerprint Sensor That Listens to Light Hitting Your Finger
Qualcomm's latest patent describes a fingerprint scanner that doesn't just shine light at your finger and photograph it. Instead, it fires light…
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