Foveon, Inc.

Richard A Lyon

Carver A Mead

A focusing method and apparatus, for use with digital cameras having an electronic viewfinder with less display resolution than in the image generated by the camera's photocell array, uses a uniformly subsampled representation of the entire image for focusing, rather than displaying a selected portion of the higher resolution image. The focusing is assisted by the exaggerated discontinuities produced by subsampling. Introducing flicker enhances focusing sensitivity by repetitively displaying, on the electronic viewfinder, a prescribed set of different reduced-resolution images obtained by subsampling the same high-resolution image at different sampling locations. Each subsampled image of the set of reduced resolution images uses a different set of substantially uniformly distributed pixels.

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Los Altos, CA, United States of America

Richard A Lyon