ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,596,077, issued on April 7, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Passive camera lens smudge detection" was invented by Xiaochun Liu (San Diego) and Yingjun Bai (San Jose, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This disclosure relates to devices, systems, and methods for passively determining the probability of the presence of a camera lens smudge on an image capture device, e.g., based on an analysis of images captured by the image capture device (and without the need for any reference images). The techniques include: obtaining an image using an image capture device and identifying and analyzing (e.g., in the form of gradient ...