Face swap camera apps are all the rage these days, and Facebook even acquired one this month to get into the game. But the technology is getting more and more creepy: you can now hijack someone else's face in real-time video.
When the darkest material on Earth was announced back in 2014, photographers suggested that it could be used for everything from the ultimate non-reflective black backdrop to an art gallery in which the photos "pop." Well, that darkest material just got even darker.
Geotagging is usually done using a built-in GPS system, but in the future it might be possible to figure out where a photo was shot just by showing the picture to an artificial intelligence program.
Cambits is a new modular camera being developed by scientists over in Columbia Engineering’s Computer Vision Laboratory. It's a set of colorful plastic blocks that can be assembled into a custom camera of your choice.
If you back up your photos on optical disks or storage drives, there's a good chance your data won't last as long as you do due to things known as "disc rot" and "data rot". But what if you want to ensure that your precious photos live longer than you? Good news: a new "eternal" storage technology may be on the horizon.
Scientists have created nanostructured glass discs that can storage digital data for billions of years.
NPR’s All Things Considered just broadcast this short segment on the …
Lenticular prints use an array of lenses to cause an image to change before your eyes as you view them from different angles. Scientists have now figured out how to do a "changing photo" trick without lenses using an inkjet printer and metallic sheets.
Some photographs have the power to burn themselves into our memories for a long time, while others are easily forgettable after they're seen. Scientists are MIT have been researching the science behind memorable images, and now they've created a web app called LaMem that can analyze any photo and assign it a memorability score.
Camera sales haven't been doing too well in recent years, but that hasn't kept picture taking from exploding. While the dedicated camera industry has seen year-on-year declines, smartphone photography has turned everyone into a casual photographer: there are now 8 times as many picture takers worldwide than there were 10 years ago.
Researchers at the University of Washington have figure out how to create 3D time-lapse video sequences of landmarks by using a collection of still photos found on the Internet. The 7-minute video above is a short presentation that shows the technology in action.
Smiling is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of photography. If you take a look at photos from many decades ago, people commonly wore stoic expressions on their faces and portraits were a much more serious affair.
Researchers at UC Berkeley recently crunched through an enormous trove of high school yearbook photos to show how smiling and portraits have evolved over the past 100+ years.
FlatCam is a new camera with a technological breakthrough: it uses a thin mask instead of a traditional camera lens, allowing the entire camera system to be thinner than a coin.
Akiwi is a new website that's designed to help you keyword photographs with minimal effort. It's a semi-automated image tagging system that is easier than manually tagging and more accurate than automatic image recognition.
Facebook yesterday announced that it's working on new artificial intelligence technology that can describe photos to people who can't see them. The AI would allow the blind to interact with the world of photo sharing in ways that aren't currently possible.
Hyperspectral cameras can see things in the world that the human eyes can't by capturing information from across the electromagnetic spectrum beyond visible light. This type of technology has all kinds of interesting applications -- researchers are using the cameras to uncover secrets in old documents and paintings, for example.
The HyperCam is a new hyperspectral camera that aims to make the technology cheap enough to be casually used by the masses.
With over a trillion photos created every year now, one feature that could help people make sense of their massive photo collections could be object recognition and automatic tagging. If your camera and photo management software can figure out what's in your shots, it'll make searching through old photos much more easy and intuitive.
Companies and researchers are working hard on pushing this field forward. Photo sharing services are already adding auto-tagging to their systems -- Flickr and Google had to work out some early "racist" bugs -- and now we're getting a glimpse of what the technology could look like live, in cameras.
Peter van Agtmael is a New York-based conflict photographer and a member of Magnum Photos. Since 2006, he has photographed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the effect of the wars in the US.
Recently, Agtmael was asked to turn his lens on a different subject: science. Stanford University reached out to Van Agtmael and invited the photographer to use his skills to document basic science research happening on campus.
Polarr is on a product launching frenzy. Back in February, the startup launched version 2.0 of its browser-based photo editor. In June, it launched its new iOS photo editing app, which saw 250,000 downloads in the first 48 hours.
Polarr's latest product, which just launched this week, is a new website called Lens Battle. It's a slick, browser-based lens comparison tool that lets you compare similar lenses using interactive sample photos.
Last year, Sony controlled around 40% of the $8.7 billion image sensor market. Now, Sony is looking to take on a new challenge: building small high-resolution sensors for the mass-market that can capture images at 1,000 frames per second. If this sensor makes it to the market, Vision Research's Phantom high-speed cameras may have some stiff competition on its hands.
Adobe's Content Aware Fill makes it easy to remove distracting elements in photos using Photoshop, but soon you may not have to. Computer vision scientists at Adobe and Princeton are working on a new technology called "distraction prediction" that can automatically find and remove distracting elements from photos.
Scientists have created a new algorithm that can magically give photos the look of famous paintings by old masters.
Researchers at Google and MIT have figured out a way to automatically remove reflections and obstructions from photographs, and their latest demo of the technology is amazing.
Check out the 6.5-minute video above for an explanation of the algorithm and some examples of what it can do.
The way lovebirds turn their heads while flying could help engineers build better camera drones that can capture scenes with less blur, even during high-speed maneuvers. That's what scientists are saying after studying the flight of lovebirds with a high-speed camera.
Since the introduction of 1080p video recording in the Canon 5D Mark II in 2008, there has been a strong adoption of DSLRs for pro and amateur video production purposes, and video features have become standard in DSLRs in recent years.
But the growth in DSLR usage for pro video applications may be rather short-lived: a recent report predicts that it will actually plummet over the next few years.
One of the emerging trends in the world of photography is the idea of automated recognition and tagging of things found in photographs. Flickr can now suggest autotags for your photos, and Google's new Photos service lets you search through your unlabeled photos using advanced image recognition.
The same technologies are coming for real-time camera features as well. Qualcomm is working on a system called SceneDetect that lets cameras recognize what they're looking at in real time.
Celebrities now have another reason to shy away from paparazzi photographers. Scientists have created a new technique for creating controllable digital versions of celebrities using only a set of paparazzi photos to reconstruct faces and create convincing expressions.
Camera apps these days already have the ability to analyze your scenes before you shoot them, but what if they could analyze your food before you eat it? That's what Google researchers are working on: they're trying to teach a computer to calculate calories from ordinary snapshots of food.
Popularized by the likes of Instagram, photo filters are divisive in the world of photography: some people love using and viewing them, while others hate what they've done to the medium. No matter which side of the aisle you find yourself on, one thing is clear: filters can have a big impact these days on how popular your shared images are.
And that effect has now been quantified: it turns out filtered photos are 21% more likely to be viewed online than their original, unprocessed shots.
Time-lapses are usually created with one or more cameras by one or more photographers working together to document a particular subject, but now scientists have created a new method of time-lapse creation that uses photographs found on the Internet.
Photographers often use products such as the Lens Skirt when shooting through windows in order to reduce or remove reflections. Thanks to advances in computer algorithms, those physical tricks may soon find themselves alongside suitable software solutions.
Scientists at MIT have created an algorithm that can automatically remove reflections from photos that were taken through windows.
How Old Do I Look? is a simple demo website created by Microsoft engineers who are working on information management and machine learning. Given any photo showing a face, the system will do its best to guess the age and gender of the people in the shot.
Scientists have created a self-powered camera that can take pictures indefinitely without any external power. Instead, it generates its own power using the light it captures with the sensor.
Tired of waiting hours for your camera battery to recharge? A newly developed aluminum battery could one day replace lithium-ion batteries and allow you to charge from empty to full in a matter of minutes.
If you're a photographer who often shoots in very dark environments, would you want night vision eyedrops to help you see better without artificial illumination? It sounds like science fiction, but we're actually getting closer to having it be possible as an item for camera bags.
A team of "biohackers" have announced that they've figured out how to enhance human night vision by dripping a chemical onto eyeballs.
Three year old children can make sense of what they see in photos and describe them to us, but even the most advanced computers have historically had difficulties with that same task. That's quickly changing though, as computer scientists are developing powerful new ways to have computers identify what a photograph is showing.
The video above is a new TED talk given by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor who's one of the world's leading experts on computer vision. She talks about her revolutionary ImageNet project that has changed how computers "see."
The low light performance in your future camera may be improved thanks to new research in "nano earthquakes." Researchers have found that sound waves can be used to improve the electronic properties of 2D materials, paving the way for things such as camera sensors that can capture better shots in dark environments.
Did you know that some creatures can actually see the world in long exposures? Scientists recently discovered that cockroaches are the latest insect found to have that feature built into their eyes and brains. It allows the resilient little bugs to see in near-pitch black environments.
Could machines be trained to tell the difference between a beautiful portrait photo and a not-so-pleasing one? Beauty is pretty subjective, but scientists are trying to boil down the common properties of beautiful digital portrait photos so that a computer can be trained to spot them. Along the way, they're revealing interesting new things about what people look for in portraits.
One of the strange properties of light is that it behaves as both a wave and a particle. Experiments over the years have confirmed both aspects, but none have succeeded in directly observing both natures at exactly the same time... until now.
Scientists in Switzerland have successfully captured the world's first photograph showing light behaving simultaneously as both a particle and as a wave. In the image above, the top "slice" shows light behaving as a wave, while the particles can be seen in the slice below.
Explorer Sam Cossman recently employed the help of multiple drones to capture photos and footage of the Marum Crater in an active volcano on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. He ended up losing multiple drones in the process, but he left the island with spectacular images that will help provide a better understanding of the volcano and the life that exists around it.