The marketing name is "night sight" or "night mode"; the filing name here is the unglamorous prerequisite — low-light autofocus. Google's granted patent US12114078B2, issued October 8, 2024 and naming inventors including Ying Chen Lou, claims a technique for focusing the camera when there is barely any light. Its CPC tags H04N 23/73 and H04N 23/71 are exposure-control and focus classes.
On the record, the celebrated part of low-light photography is the post-capture reconstruction, but it cannot save a shot that was never in focus. Autofocus systems rely on contrast or phase detection, both of which degrade as light vanishes — there simply is not enough signal to find the sharpest point. Solving focus in the dark is a distinct, earlier problem from cleaning up the resulting image, and this patent attacks that earlier step.
Why it matters to the whole pipeline: night mode is a chain, and the chain breaks at its weakest link. Spectacular fusion and neural enhancement are wasted if the lens focused on the wrong plane or hunted and failed. A reliable low-light autofocus is the unglamorous foundation the impressive features stand on.
Novel, or just renamed? Autofocus is mature art, but pushing it to function in extreme low light is a genuine frontier, and the claim's interest is in the specific technique for doing so. The principle is old; reliable operation at the light-starved edge is the claimed advance.
The strategic frame is that Google's camera reputation rests on its computational pipeline, and that pipeline is only as good as its inputs. Patenting the focus step protects the front of the chain, not just the showy back end — a sign of how complete a serious camera-software portfolio has to be.
Follow the filing, not the night shot. Before the night-mode magic, the camera has to focus in the dark — and the 2024 grant shows Google patenting that quiet, essential step.