Patent ID: 8502911

Claim:
An image pickup apparatus comprising: an image pickup lens; an image pickup device obtaining image pickup data based on light detected; a microlens array including a plurality of microlenses, and arranged on an image forming plane of the image pickup lens; and an image processing section producing an image based on the image pickup data obtained from the image pickup device, wherein, each of the microlenses corresponds to one of a plurality of image pickup regions of the image pickup device, each image pickup region corresponding to a plurality of pixels of the image pickup device, each image pickup region includes a plurality of positions such that positions in an image pickup region respectively correspond to positions in the other image pickup regions; each pixel of the plurality of pixels corresponding to an image pickup region is located at one of the plurality of positions, and the image processing section includes a parallax image producing section that extracts pixel data from the image pickup data, and then synthesizes the pixel data to produce a plurality of parallax images, each parallax image being produced from pixel data corresponding to a given position, including pixel data corresponding to all of the pixels that are located at a same position as the given position and excluding pixel data corresponding to pixels located at other positions, and a resizing section that performs a resizing process on each of the parallax images to change the resolutions thereof.