Lenovo has redefined laptop innovation with the introduction of the Yoga Slim 9i, the world’s first laptop featuring a camera hidden beneath the display. This breakthrough design eliminates visible notches and bezels, delivering a seamless, uninterrupted screen experience. However, achieving this milestone required overcoming a significant engineering challenge—ensuring high-quality video capture despite the physical barrier of the display obstructing the camera’s light input.
The key to solving this challenge? Visionary.ai’s cutting-edge real-time video denoising technology, which dramatically enhances image clarity even when the camera receives reduced light and distortion due to its placement beneath the display. This AI-based approach sets a new benchmark for laptop cameras, allowing users to experience crystal-clear video quality in all lighting conditions.
The Challenge of Under-Display Cameras
The introduction of under-display cameras (UDCs) in consumer electronics is a major step toward achieving truly bezel-less designs, but this innovation comes with trade-offs. The display layer covering the camera reduces light transmission, causes diffraction effects, and introduces optical distortions, all of which degrade image quality.
Traditional denoising and deblurring methods inside the Image Signal Processor (ISP) struggle to compensate for these issues, as they rely on predefined processing pipelines that cannot fully recover details lost in raw image capture. To overcome these challenges, Lenovo partnered with Visionary.ai, an imaging technology company specializing in real-time AI-driven video enhancement.
AI-Powered Video Enhancement
Unlike conventional solutions that rely on fixed image correction techniques, Visionary.ai’s technology operates directly on raw sensor data before ISP processing, ensuring that image quality is optimized at the earliest stage of the pipeline.
This approach offers several key advantages:
- Raw-Domain Processing: By working with uncompressed sensor data, the AI can reduce noise before other image enhancement processes take place, preventing artifacts caused by traditional noise suppression techniques.
- Spatio-Temporal Enhancement: The AI model leverages information across multiple video frames, improving detail reconstruction and reducing motion inconsistencies.
- Low-Power Execution: Optimized inference on Intel’s Lunar Lake processor, ensuring minimal impact on system performance and battery life.
By integrating these AI-driven techniques, Visionary.ai enables the under-display camera to achieve image clarity comparable to traditional laptop cameras, even though it operates with significantly less light.
Technical Performance: How Visionary.ai Validates Image Quality
To ensure the effectiveness of its AI-based video enhancement, Visionary.ai evaluates its technology using industry-standard image quality metrics, including:
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) – Measures the clarity of an image by comparing the level of signal (true image detail) to the level of noise.
- Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) – Assesses how much noise reduction improves image fidelity.
- Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) – Evaluates the perceived visual quality of an image by comparing it to a reference standard.
- Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) – Measures an imaging system’s ability to preserve fine details and contrast at different spatial frequencies, ensuring sharpness and resolution consistency across the frame.
Visionary.ai’s testing demonstrates that its AI-enhanced ISP pipeline significantly improves image clarity, effectively suppressing noise while preserving fine details. This validation underscores the efficacy of AI-driven denoising in overcoming the limitations of under-display cameras.
Beyond Laptops: The Future of AI-Powered Imaging
While Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 9i marks the first commercial deployment of this technology in a mass-production laptop, Visionary.ai’s AI-based video enhancement has far-reaching applications beyond consumer electronics.
Other Use Cases Include:
- Security Cameras – Enhancing visibility in low-light and high-noise environments, improving surveillance footage quality.
- Mobile Phones – Advancing low-light video denoising for smartphone cameras, enabling brighter, clearer video calls and improved video quality in dark environments. As smartphone manufacturers push for thinner bezels and smaller sensors, Visionary.ai’s software ensures high-quality imaging without requiring larger camera hardware.
- Medical Imaging – Increasing detail and reducing noise in low-light imaging techniques such as endoscopy imaging.
These applications demonstrate how AI-powered denoising can revolutionize image processing across multiple industries, enabling new levels of clarity, efficiency, and real-time performance.
A New Era for Laptop Cameras
The launch of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i is a testament to the power of AI-driven innovation in imaging technology. By integrating Visionary.ai’s real-time video enhancement, Lenovo has successfully introduced the world’s first mass-production laptop with an under-display camera, setting a new standard for seamless design without compromising image quality.
Nikhil Kuthe, Executive Director of Worldwide Consumer Yoga Business at Lenovo, highlighted this in the official press release: “Users can now enjoy a sleek, borderless display design while still having clear, noise-free video calls thanks to our collaboration with Visionary.ai to bring AI video enhancement technology to the Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i.”
As AI continues to evolve, we can expect further breakthroughs in camera technology, paving the way for even more advanced imaging solutions in consumer electronics and beyond.
Credit: Visionary.ai
