Apple Focusing on New Colour Correcting Compact Camera

Could Apple be looking at other ways of using their alleged 5MP sensor?

Slipped in between 15 other patents granted to Apple this week is this one that goes into depth about colour correction in a compact camera. Not a camera shoved in an iPhone or iPad – an honest-to-goodness stand-alone number!

This is a handy follow-up to the Apple Camera patent that when in July last year.

The camera colour-correction patent is focused (arf!) on detecting the actual colorus in the shot, rather than just the lighting conditions.

The science bit in the patent explains it better than I can:

“The diffuser scatters the light from the scene target (420), as well as the light directly from light source 409 and the light (e.g., 425) from other sources (or light reflecting objects). The diffuser scatters the surrounding light towards the image sensing device to illuminate the image sensing device with the light of the color of the diffuser under the current lightening condition (provided by the surrounding light coming towards the diffuser). The color signals generated by the image sensing device for the light of the color of the diffuser under the current lightening condition can be compared to the color of the diffuser under the standard lightening condition (or a reference lightening condition) so that the color cast of the light source on the image of a scene can be corrected accordingly.”

Simples!

This could be another idea that never makes it out though. Apparently the first Apple Camera patent was submitted seven years ago! But, just think – we’ve already seen their first ever phone to use a forward-facing camera for vid calls this week 😉