Apple Inc.

Yongfang Liang

Ting Chen

Haitao Guo

Marius Tico

Paul M Hubel

Xuemei Zhang

Yingjun Bai

Farhan A Baqai

Todd Stephen Sachs

Frank Doepke

George E Williams

Fabio Riccardi

Munehiro Mori

Anita Nariani Schulze

Juanqing Chen

Munchiro Mori

Special blend operations for wide area-of-view image generation utilizing a 'floating auto exposure' scheme are described. Pixel values in the two images being stitched together are blended within a transition band around a 'seam.' identified in the overlap region between the images after changes in exposure and/or color saturation are accounted for. In some embodiments, changes in exposure and/or color saturation are accounted for through the use of one or more exposure mapping curves, the selection and use of which are based, at least in part, on a determined &#x201c;Exposure Ratio&#x201d; value, i.e., the amount that the camera's exposure settings have deviated from their initial capture settings. In other embodiments, the Exposure Ratio value is also used to determine regions along the seam where either: alpha blending, Poisson blending&#x2014;or a combination of the two&#x2014;should be used to blend in the transitional areas on each side of the seam.

Exposure mapping and dynamic thresholding for blending of multiple images using floating exposure

A method for automatic image capture control and digital imaging is described. An image buffer is initialized to store a digital image produced by an image sensor, through allocation of a region in memory for the buffer that is large enough to store a full resolution frame from the image sensor. While non-binning streaming frames, from the sensor and in the buffer, are being displayed in preview, the sensor is reconfigured into binning mode, and then binned streaming frames are processed in the buffer, but without allocating a smaller region in memory for the buffer. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.

Dynamic camera mode switching

Systems, methods, and computer readable media to capture and process high dynamic range (HDR) images when appropriate for a scene are disclosed. When appropriate, multiple images at a single&#x2014;slightly underexposed&#x2014;exposure value are captured (making a constant bracket HDR capture sequence) and local tone mapping (LTM) applied to each image. Local tone map and histogram information can be used to generate a noise-amplification mask which can be used during fusion operations. Images obtained and fused in the disclosed manner provide high dynamic range with improved noise and de-ghosting characteristics.

Constant bracket high dynamic range (cHDR) operations

Calculating a temporal filter values to filter video data for noise and ghosting artifacts. A sensor specific noise model may be derived using the video capture settings of the video source to estimate the noise variance for an image, and to determine the amount of the temporal filtering to be applied to a frame or pixel. The global motion and sensor specific noise model may be used to populate filter coefficient look-up tables based on the local motion and luma values of each pixel in the frame. The maximum absolute difference between frames may be used to estimate global motion between two frames such that filter strength may be reduced for frames exhibiting high global motion and increased for frames exhibiting low global motion. According to an embodiment, the increase in temporal filtering between frames may be capped to avoid sudden visible noise differences between frames.

Scene adaptive temporal filtering

System and method for automatic image capture control in digital imaging

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Yongfang Liang