Patent Document ID: 9055213
Application ID: 14497171
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A camera array, comprising: a monolithic integrated module forming a plurality of cameras, where each camera comprises: a lens element array forming the optics of each of the plurality of cameras, where the optics of each camera comprises at least one lens element and at least one aperture; and a single semiconductor substrate on which all of the pixels and control circuitry for each camera are formed; and at least one spectral filter located within each camera, where each spectral filter is configured to pass a specific spectral band of light; a controller configured to control operation parameters of the camera array; and an image processing pipeline module comprising a parallax confirmation and measurement module; wherein the plurality of cameras forms at least a 2×2 array of cameras that includes multiple redundant pairs of cameras; wherein at least one camera includes a Bayer filter; wherein images captured by the plurality of cameras include different occlusions sets, where the occlusion set of a first camera is the portion of a scene visible to a second camera in the plurality of cameras that is occluded from the view of the first camera; wherein the image processing pipeline module comprises a parallax confirmation and measurement module configured to measure parallax using images captured by the plurality of cameras by: detecting parallax-induced changes that are consistent across the plurality of cameras taking into account the position of the cameras within the at least 2×2 array of cameras; and ignoring pixels in the images captured by the plurality of cameras that are in an exposed occlusion set; and wherein the parallax confirmation and measurement module is further configured to estimate distance to an object in images captured by the plurality of cameras using measured parallax.