Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

This article has a round-up of some new advances in Digital Photography. The most interesting to me was this method for adjusting focus after the picture is taken (there's an example in the article)

Research under way now could let the camera, or a computer afterward, understand the third dimension. That could be useful as a way to help the camera figure how best to focus and expose the a shot. More dramatically, it could lead to three-dimensional hologram shots, assuming somebody crafts economical way to view such data.

One 3D idea comes from Stanford University, where Keith Fife and colleagues have created a camera image sensor that can gauge depth. That sensor works by using hundreds of tiny lenses over the sensor pixels; by comparing the subimages from each subarray of pixels, a computer can judge how far away various features are.

A related technology, from start-up Refocus Imaging, produces data files that can be processed to focus the camera after the photo has been taken. It also can be used to deliberately bring a background into focus or to blur it so it's not distracting.