The marketing term is "AI camera" or "computational photography." The filing name, across multiple vendors, is some variant of "compositing high dynamic range images." That gap is the whole story. When a phone takes a photo of a backlit scene and somehow keeps both the bright sky and the dark foreground visible, what happened is not a single magic exposure — it is the camera capturing several frames at different brightness levels and merging them. The patents say so plainly.
Take Samsung first. Its granted patent US11128809B2, "System and method for compositing high dynamic range images" (issued September 21, 2021), describes exactly that compositing step — combining image data to produce a single high-dynamic-range result. Its CPC classifications sit in G06T 5/50 (image enhancement by combining images) and H04N 5/2355 (the imaging class for HDR capture). The named technique is fusion, not invention of light.
Now Apple, same idea from a different angle. US11715184B2, "Backwards-compatible high dynamic range (HDR) images" (issued August 1, 2023), addresses what happens after fusion: how to store the extra dynamic range so a wide-gamut display can show it while older software still sees a normal photo. That is a real, specific problem — an HDR image is useless if half your devices render it as a washed-out mess — and the claim is a method for solving it, not a vague "AI enhancement."
Here is the myth-buster, then: the core of computational photography is decades-old image-processing math — align several frames, weight them by exposure, blend. What changed is that phone silicon got fast enough to do it in the moment between you tapping the shutter and seeing the result. The "AI" label gets attached because some steps (deciding what to keep from each frame, reducing noise) now use learned models, but the load-bearing idea is multi-frame fusion, and it shows up in nearly every vendor's portfolio.
Samsung's own filings show the technique evolving toward harder cases. US11889033B2, "Flare mitigation via deconvolution using high dynamic range imaging" (issued January 30, 2024), uses the same HDR capture to attack lens flare — the streaks you get shooting toward a light. Different symptom, same underlying tool: capture more information than one exposure can hold, then compute the photo you actually wanted.
The precision point: granted claims cover specific compositing and storage methods, and the existence of parallel grants at Apple and Samsung tells you this is contested, shared territory rather than one company's secret. So when two phones produce suspiciously similar "AI" photos of the same hard scene, that is not coincidence — it is two implementations of the same well-trodden idea, each protected by its own slice of the patent record.