research

Japan's Ministry of Defense has unveiled an amazing "Spherical Flying Machine": a 42-inch remote controlled ball that can zip around in any direction at ~37mph. Built using off-the-shelf parts for about $1,400, in Internet is abuzz over the potential applications, which include military reconnaissance and search-and-rescue operations. What we're most interested in, however, is the device's potential as an aerial camera for things like sports photography and combat photojournalism.

Here’s the current state of imagery: still cameras can shoot HD video, video cameras can capture high quality stills, …

Adobe's amazing Image Deblurring demo was the star of the Sneak Peeks event at Adobe MAX 2011, but it was just one of the many demos shown that night. Another interesting photography-related demo was for "Pixel Nuggets": a feature that lets you search a large library of photos for features (e.g. people, landmarks, patterns, logos).

Yesterday we shared some clearer comparison images from Adobe's jaw-dropping Image Deblurring demo. Cari Gushiken over on the Photoshop.com blog has written up a post that sheds a little more light on how the idea came about, the current challenges they face, and where they see it headed.

Last week we shared a sneak peek at some jaw-dropping image deblurring technology currently in development at Adobe. The video wasn't the best quality and was captured from the audience, so we didn't get to see the example images very clearly. Adobe has now released an official video of the demo, giving us a better glimpse at what the feature can do.

The 'Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera' is an awesome new camera developed by a group of computer science researchers led by Jonas Pfeil.

MIT scientists have discovered that graphene, a material consisting of one-atom thick sheets …

A team of researchers at UC Davis have come up with a super-cheap …

We always get a laugh when news organizations or governments try to pass off bad Photoshop jobs …

Demos at graphics conferences are often interesting to watch because they offer a sneak peek at technologies that may …

We’re now one step closer to being able to take photographs with our minds. Scientists at UC Berkeley have …

According to the smart folks over at MIT, this video shows footage that …

Ever wonder why certain people always seem to engage in meaningless Canon vs Nikon vs et al. camera brand debates at every opportunity? A recent study conducted at the University of Illinois has found that the more knowledge and experience you have with a particular brand, the stronger your self-esteem is tied to it.

Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.

Color is simply how our brains respond to different wavelengths of light, and wavelengths outside the spectrum of visible light are invisible and colorless to us simply because our eyes can't detect them. Since colors are created in our brains, what if we all see colors differently from one another? BBC created a fascinating program called "Do You See What I See?" that explores this question, and the findings are pretty startling.

Facial recognition features are appearing in everything from cameras to photo-sharing sites, but have you thought about the different …

Facial recognition technology has become ubiquitous in recent years, being found in everything from the latest compact camera to websites like Facebook. The same may soon be said about location recognition.

Artificial lens flare is an important part of making certain computer generated scenes look realistic, but up …

What if in the future, the human eye itself could be turned into a camera by simply reading and recording the data that it sends to the brain? As crazy as it sounds, researchers have already accomplished this at a very basic level.

A study conducted by market research firm J.D. Power and Associates has found that "Nikon Pro Series" DSLRs rank highest in customer satisfaction. The company surveyed 4,500 verified online DSLR buyers to find out their satisfaction across five factors: image quality, durability, features, ease of use, and responsiveness.

The Nikon Pro Series ranks highest in online buyer satisfaction with a score of 914. The Nikon Pro Series performs particularly well in shutter speed/lag time, durability and reliability and ease of operation. The Canon Mark-Series follows in the rankings with a score of 909, and performs particularly well in performance and picture quality. The Canon D-Series and Nikon D-Series rank third in a tie, each with a score of 889.

Overall, customers were most satisfied with image quality but least satisfied with durability and responsiveness.

A compact camera probably isn't the first thing someone would grab when looking to make a photo with an extremely shallow depth-of-field, since the small aperture and small sensor limit it in this regard. That might soon be different: a recently published patent application by Samsung shows that the company is looking into producing achieving shallow depth of fields with compact cameras by using a second lens to create a depth map for each photo.

You might soon be able to control Nikon DSLRs using only your emotions. A patent published recently shows that …

Thought the grain-of-salt-sized camera announced in Germany earlier this year was small? Well, researchers at Cornell have …

Robots might not be able to convey emotions or tell stories through photographs, but one thing they’re theoretically better …

Late last year we showed you an interesting demonstration of HDR video filmed using two Canon 5D Mark IIs. The cameras captured the exact same scene at different exposure values using a beam-splitter. Now, a new camera called AMP has been developed that captures real-time HDR video using a single lens. The trick is that there are two beam-splitters in the camera that take the light and direct it onto three different sensors, giving the system a dynamic range of 17 stops. Check out some sample clips in the video above -- they might be pretty ugly, but the technology here is pretty interesting.

Researchers in Australia are working on developing a thin piezoelectric film that can …

A company called Lytro has just launched with $50 million in funding and, unlike Color, the technology is pretty mind-blowing. It's designing a camera that may be the next giant leap in the evolution of photography -- a consumer camera that shoots photos that can be refocused at any time. Instead of capturing a single plane of light like traditional cameras do, Lytro's light-field camera will use a special sensor to capture the color, intensity, and vector direction of the rays of light (data that's lost with traditional cameras).

[...] the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. [#]

Try clicking the sample photograph above. You'll find that you can choose exactly where the focus point in the photo is as you're viewing it! The company plans to unveil their camera sometime this year, with the goal of having the camera's price be somewhere between $1 and $10,000...

I’m not sure how useful this would be for most people, but it’s a neat look at the kinds …

Computer vision PhD student Zdenek Kalal developed a camera called “Predator” that learns …

Update on 12/18/21: This video has been removed by its creator. We may soon be using software that can easily …

The applications of this on the consumer photography market are likely nil, but researchers at Ohio State University have invented a method of shooting 3D photographs using a single lens. The trick is that the lens is cut like a gem, giving it eight different facets in addition to the main face that "see" the subject from different perspectives. Custom software then takes in the image and processes the 9 different views to create a single 3D image.

If you had a camera the size of a grain of rice, that would be considered extremely small, but …

Scientists at Stanford have found that looking at pictures of loved ones can reduce pain. The study involved performing …

Apple just refreshed their line of MacBook Pro notebook computers, and one of the new features is a Thunderbolt I/O port, making the MacBook Pro the first notebook computer to have this blazing-fast interface developed by Intel (it was known as Light Peak during R&D). As the technology makes its way into more and more computers, camera makers will undoubtedly begin offering it in their cameras. Nikon Rumors recently received a rumor that the upcoming Nikon D4 will be the first DSLR camera to offer Thunderbolt.

  Canon might be rolling out a new Image Stabilized lens with a built-in teleconverter, but Tamron and …

If computers can have fans, why can't cameras? With recent Sony cameras running into unexpected limits due to the sensor overheating, Nikon may be looking to solve the problem with a good, old-fashioned fan. A recent patent filing by Nikon shows a mirrorless camera with a computer-style fan embedded into the circuit board.

NEC announced today that they’ve developed “noise suppression technologies” for compact cameras that will clean up the audio in …

With the limited lens and sensor sizes of cell phone cameras, the megapixel race isn’t really doing much to …

The Third Person Point of View Camera Rig is a unique project by …

Wow. People are taking chicken head camera stabilization pretty seriously after the fact that chickens have image stabilized heads went viral recently. Research is ongoing, and people are reporting their interesting experimental findings on YouTube.

The folks over at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have created a camera modeled after a fly's eye that provides a 360° view of the world. Packed with the 100 small cameras, what the camera captures is combined on a computer to provide a single 3D view of the world.