Olympus patent: This may be the bridge sensor to support FT lenses on MFT cameras.

We all know Olympus said they will bring full Four Thirds autofocus support on Micro Four Thirds cameras. And obviously on sensor phase detection is needed to achieve this. But the issue with this is that you have a sort of “waste” of Megapixels because you have to give up some space for the AF pixels. US patent Application Number US20130016274 discloses such a sensor made by Olympus that seems to solve that issue: “To improve autofocusing performance, however, a relatively large number of AF pixels need to be arranged in the image pickup device, and lack of image signal of the AF pixel portions disadvantageously causes degradation of picked-up image quality. For this reason, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-155929 proposes a technique for reducing the number of AF pixels by using normal pixels to estimate pixel values for AF pixels.”

This may be the right solution for the high end bridge MFT-FT camera :)