The marketing name is "HDR" or "Smart HDR"; the filing name includes "deghosting." Granted patent US11025830B1, issued June 1, 2021, addresses the dirty secret of multi-frame photography: when a phone captures several exposures and merges them for dynamic range, anything that moved between frames — a hand, a leaf, a passing car — leaves a translucent ghost. The patent's CPC tags G06T 5/50 and H04N 5/2355 place it precisely in the fusion-and-HDR art.
On the record, this is how computational photography actually works, and why it is hard. The phone is not taking one picture; it is taking a burst and reconstructing a single image from it. The headline features — night mode, HDR, motion freeze — are all downstream of the same problem: aligning and combining frames that disagree because the world moved. Deghosting is the step that decides which pixels to trust.
Novel, or just renamed? Multi-frame fusion is established art, and deghosting techniques predate this grant. The patent's contribution is a specific method, not the category. That distinction matters because "AI camera" marketing tends to imply invention where the reality is incremental refinement of a known pipeline — the principle is old, the particular reconstruction method is the claimed work.
The strategic read is that the camera arms race among phone makers is fought almost entirely in this image-signal-processing layer now, not in the optics. Sensors and lenses are largely commoditized suppliers; the differentiation — and the patents — live in the fusion, alignment, and deghosting software. That is why every flagship's camera marketing is really software marketing.
Scope, stated plainly: this is a granted patent to an individual inventor, one node in a vast computational-photography landscape that includes Google, Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm. It illustrates the technique without defining the market.
Follow the filing, not the demo. The next time a phone maker claims its camera "uses AI" to fix motion, the honest description is closer to this 2021 grant: multi-frame fusion with deghosting, a datable pipeline step, not magic.