Patent Document ID: 8724000
Application ID: 12957316
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A camera, comprising: an objective lens configured to refract light from a scene located in front of the camera to form an image of the scene at an image plane of the objective lens; a microlens array, positioned between the objective lens and a photosensor that comprises a plurality of pixels configured to capture light projected on to the photosensor, the microlens array comprises a plurality of microlenses that are each configured to sample a respective region of the image of the scene formed at the image plane by the objective lens, each region of the image of the scene sampled by the microlenses partially overlaps at least one other region of the image of the scene sampled by the microlenses; a plurality of optical elements fabricated as apertures in a mask layer interposed between the pixels of the microlens array and the photosensor to reduce areas of the image of the scene sampled by the pixels so that the area of the image of the scene sampled by pixels at respective locations on the photosensor do not overlap the areas of the image of the scene sampled by pixels at other locations on the photosensor onto which an overlapping region of the image of the scene is projected, each said location on the photosensor samples radiance from a particular area of the image of the scene; and the photosensor configured to capture a flat that includes each of the regions of the image of the scene projected onto the photosensor by the microlenses in a separate microimage in the flat that is processed by a super-resolution technique that interleaves pixels in neighboring microimages according to a subpixel shift to render a high-resolution image of the scene, the super-resolution technique comprising, for each point in the high-resolution image, sampling values at pixels in two or more different microimages in the flat and blending the sampled values to generate a value for a pixel at the respective point in the high-resolution image.