The dataset in scope contains 35,958 published records covering under display camera structures, camera modules and related display and imaging claims filed or published between 2015 and the 2026 cut-off. This counts individual published documents rather than deduplicated inventions, so the same underlying invention can appear more than once across jurisdictions or continuations. Patent families are the more reliable unit for comparing true invention counts, and the assignee ranking in this dataset is built on that family basis.

Filing is concentrated at the top: the five most active assignees together account for 17.8% of all 35,958 records, and the ten most active account for 26.9%. That still leaves the majority of filings spread across a long tail of smaller filers, so no single company holds a dominant blocking position across the whole field. The leading assignees span major display panel makers and consumer-electronics manufacturers rather than a single specialist supplier.

Filings peaked in 2017 at 404 and declined over the following years; across the last three-year span that can be treated as complete, 2021 to 2024, filings fell from 221 to 101, a 54% drop. Publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in the raw data are still incomplete and should not be read as confirming a continued slowdown. The honest read is that the field cooled from its 2017 peak through 2024, with the most recent trend still unresolved.

Pictorial communication (H04N) is the largest single class, appearing in 22.0% of the 35,958 records, followed by electric digital data processing (G06F) at 9.5% and display control circuits (G09G) at 7.4%. Photographic apparatus (G03B), semiconductor devices (H01L), image data processing (G06T), and optical elements and modulation (G02B and G02F) each sit in the 4.5% to 5.8% range. Because a single record can carry several classes, these shares are not mutually exclusive and add up to more than the total record count.

US20220196890A1, filed by Ningbo Sunny Opotech and published 23 June 2022, describes an under-display camera assembly where the display's camera region has a lower pixel density than the rest of the panel, with a camera module behind it that places an iris diaphragm between the pixel light-emission layer and the foremost lens of the lens group. It is a representative example of the structural approach dominating this field: differential pixel density plus a specifically positioned optical stack. Anyone designing a competing under-panel camera module should check their diaphragm and lens-group positioning against this structural pattern before assuming a design-around.

The optical classes G02B, G02F and G03B carry the lightest density among the major classes in scope, each between 4.5% and 5.8% of records, compared with 22.0% for pictorial communication. That gap suggests module-level optical design and light-modulation claims have more open room than image-processing or display-control claims, which sit on denser prior art. It is a relative observation based on class density, not a guarantee of allowability, and any specific claim still needs a freedom-to-operate check against the leading assignees' active families.