ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,418,724, issued on Sept. 16, was assigned to GOOGLE LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Dark flash normal camera" was invented by Jason Lawrence (Seattle), Supreeth Achar (Seattle) and Zhihao Xia (St. Louis).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques of estimating surface normals and reflectance from poorly-lit images includes using, in addition to an RGB image of a subject of a set of subjects, an image illuminated with near-infrared (NIR) radiation to determine albedo and surface normal maps for performing an image relighting, the image being captured with the NIR radiation from essentially the same perspective from which the RGB image was ca...