In this day and age, you’re likely to have a hard time walking down the street and not seeing a camera somewhere. If it isn’t held by the shutter-happy tourist in short shorts, it’s the CCTV camera mounted at the entrance of the local subway station.
How does one maintain anonymity? Staying in? No! You put on fabulous privacy-protecting glasses under development by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics.
Read more…
Under development in the Ishikawa Oku Lab at the University of Tokyo is a dynamic target tracking camera capable of keeping fast-moving objects centered in frame.
Read more…
Turns out that driver’s license photos are useful for more than acute embarrassment. States, realizing they have a de-facto visual database of most of their residents, are increasingly plugging those photos into facial-recognition software and Facebook to solve crimes — and worrying privacy advocates in the process.
Read more…
Search giant Google has revealed that it’s working on a global database it expects to help rid the Internet of child porn.
Read more…
“It’s About So Much More than Megapixels” —Pelican ImagingPelican Imaging has released this short video that offers some ideas of what its upcoming Lytro-style “array camera” will be able to do.
The company says that consumers will be able to capture 3D video on their phone. With each frame, you’ll be able to refocus after the fact, measure distances between two points in the image, and create a 3D model of any scene.
This is the same startup company that Nokia reportedly invested in earlier this year.
We humans have done quite a lot in the span of a thousand years. We’ve discovered new lands by sail boat, sent men to the moon, and successfully managed to ruin the economy-class flying experience as we know it. So now that it’s 2013 — the obvious move would be to beam an animated GIF to a distant solar system, right?
Read more…
There’s no doubt about the fact that using the camera on your shiny smartphone is killing your battery life. But up until now, it seems like the only proposed solutions have been to work on the battery itself instead of looking at the camera.
Researchers at both Microsoft and Rice University think they’ve come up with a solution that will make your gadget’s camera far more energy efficient by focusing on the camera’s sensor and the power it uses.
Read more…
The Curiosity Rover has been trekking the surface of Mars since late last year, and so far, there has been no shortage of great imagery.
But what gear is behind those intriguing images we see so frequently? NASA JPL has put together a short video on the camera equipment on board the Curiosity rover. Read more…
Right after Google I/O wrapped up in May, we shared the news that Google’s personal image search had just gotten a whole lot better. The tech giant claimed that you could now search through yours and your friends photos based on visual content, even if the photos themselves weren’t labeled or tagged.
At the time, all we knew was that the system used “computer vision and machine learning” to detect subjects like “flowers,” “food” or “car” and generate searchable tag data that makes your photos easier to find. Now, thanks to Google’s Research blog, we’re getting a bit more detail on the tech under the hood. Read more…
Fujifilm and Panasonic have joined forces and created an image sensor that blows everything currently on the market completely out of the water. By using Fuji’s patented “organic photoelectric conversion material” to collect light instead of the traditional silicon photodiode, they’ve created a sensor that nearly doubles the dynamic range of the best sensor currently on the market. Read more…
