The corpus shows a small group of repeat filers alongside a long tail of single-family entrants, with no assignee showing filings in the latest tracked year across the leaders monitored. The highest-citation foundational patent, US6791072B1, covers methods for forming a curved image sensor module and anchors much of the later fabrication art. Because recent-year momentum is flat across every leading assignee tracked, this looks like a field where the early claiming positions were staked out some years ago rather than one with an active current leader.

Filings ran at 15 in 2017, rose to a peak of 23 in 2018, then fell sharply — the midpoint year of 2022 logged just one filing. This pattern is typical of a narrow technical niche where the core fabrication methods (wafer bonding, controlled thinning, segmentation) were claimed early, leaving later entrants fewer novel angles. Publication lag of roughly eighteen months means the very latest years will understate true activity somewhat, but a drop of this size is unlikely to be lag alone.

The receiving-office data shows the United States carrying the largest share at 82 of 171 records, with PCT filings, the European Patent Office, South Korea, China and Taiwan trailing behind. A filing strategy that mirrors the existing art would prioritise US coverage first, then PCT for optionality, with EPO and the Asian offices as secondary jurisdictions depending on target markets. This is a reflection of where past applicants filed, not a guarantee of where future enforcement risk concentrates.

US9349763B1, assigned to Omnivision Technologies, claims a specific manufacturing method: bonding a light-transmitting substrate to an image sensor wafer at elevated pressure to form a hermetically sealed cavity, then thinning the wafer to induce a concave curve in the pixel array. It blocks that particular wafer-bonding-and-thinning route to a concave sensor, along with the resulting concave-surface structure as claimed. Designs using a different curving mechanism — segmentation into flat tiles, for instance, or a convex rather than concave curvature achieved by other means — sit outside its literal claim scope, though a full freedom-to-operate check should read the claims in full rather than rely on this summary.

The IPC composition suggests yes, particularly on the processing side: G06T and G06K, the image-data-processing classes, carry only 10 and 8 records respectively against 130 in H01L and 105 in H04N. That gap implies that algorithms for correcting distortion or handling recognition tasks specific to curved or segmented sensor output are comparatively under-claimed relative to the physical fabrication methods. Anyone filing there should still run a targeted search, since a thin IPC count in this corpus does not rule out relevant art filed under a different classification scheme.