CS: I don't really care what you call it, Samsung is planning on doing compressed sensing!

Image Sensor World, a very good blog on what is happening in the imaging sensors area, just featured the following tidbits:

Samsung Plans 3D Cameras with Single Sensor

Korea Times quoted Park Sang-jin, president of Samsung’s digital imaging division, saying "As the issue with 3D televisions is providing a glass-free viewer experience, 3D cameras has a similar challenge for achieving a one-lens, one-imaging sensor approach. The two-lens, two-sensor 3D camera released by Fuji is still too expensive and inconvenient for users."

Park also said that the company may produce a camera capable of taking three-dimensional (3D) images sometime next year, but admitted that it will be a digital guinea pig, saying that the "real" 3D cameras that are suited for conventional use won’t probably be available until after 2012.

In the comment section, I guessed that the process involved in this technology would include some of Ramesh Raskar et al work/ideas. The blog owner also mentioned a Kodak patent. Either way, light from different views is superimposed on the same chip, i.e. several views are multiplexed together. Irrespective to the reconstruction method that might take advantage of the particulars of the hardware, this is compressed sensing in that information is being multiplexed (and compressed) to eventually be produced back to the user (in 3D format). Now the question of interest is really whether the demultiplexing operation will use a sparsity argument. Some people might take the view that if this is not the case, then it is not what we all call compressed sensing. However, one should always be very circumstantial on the matter: Demultiplexing your information through some known engineering does not means that you are not implicitly using the sparsity assumption.

Of note, one of the commenter is none other than Eric Fossum, the inventor of the CMOS Active Pixel Technology.

By the way, Ramesh let me know that the Camera Culture Lab has now a page on Facebook. Another Facebook page is of interest is Yes, CSI Image Processing is Science ( Fiction! )