Nokia: Yes, Computational Imaging in Future Lumia Smartphones

Earlier this month, we reported on Nokia’s generous investment into Pelican Imaging. The reason for this investment seemed rather obvious: Help Nokia gain an advantage in the smartphone market, with the help of LightField technology.

Now, Jo Harlow, Executive Vice President for Smartphone Business at Nokia, has practically confirmed the rumours: Nokia engineers are working on advancing smartphone photography beyond the megapixels, and want to bring light field tech (a relatively new and promising branch of computational imaging) into the miniature shape required for future Lumia smartphones:

Being able to capture even more data — data you cannot even see with the human eye that you can only see by actually going back to the picture and being able to do things with them. I think that is a key challenge to bring to a smartphone because computational imaging or computational photography requires computational power. That was one of the limitations in bringing that kind of experiences on a smartphone. Changes in the processing capabilities of smartphones opens it up as an area of exploration.

You can find the full-length interview with Jo Harlow here: Computational photography is next smartphone frontier

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