Sharp recently announced its AQUOS SH-01D phone, which is one of the few phones on the market that feature optical image stabilization. The phone is powered by Android OS, and features a 12.1 megapixel 1/3.2-inch CMOS sensor. The demo above shows how effective the stabilization is at canceling out small movements of the sensor.
(via Engadget)
Xerox is showing off a new tool called Aesthetic Image Search over on Open Xerox (the Xerox equivalent of Google Labs). It’s an algorithm being developed at one of the company’s labs that aims to make judging a photograph’s aesthetics something a computer can do.
Many methods for image classification are based on recognition of parts — if you find some wheels and a road, then the picture is more likely to contain a car than a giraffe. But what about quality? What is it about a picture of a building or a flower or a person that makes the image stand out from the hundreds which are taken with a digital camera every day? Here we tackle the difficult task of trying to learn automatically what makes an image special, and makes photo enthusiasts mark it as high quality.
You can play around with a simple demo of the technology here. Don’t tell the Long Beach Police Department about it though — they might use it against photographers.
This short film, titled “Mobius”, is one of the short films Canon screened at last night’s Hollywood announcement for the EOS C300 and concept cinema DSLR. It was made by Vincent Laforet, who was also selected to test the Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 1D Mark IV.
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Dan Bailey over at The Photoletariat captured this brief video of Lowepro showing off its new Lens Exchange 200AW case at PhotoPlus Expo in NYC. The case is designed to help you swap lenses with one hand — instead of setting one lens down before taking out the new one, it expands to reveal a second compartment. Stick the old lens in, pull the new lens out, and then collapse the case back into its compact form.
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.
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Here’s the current state of imagery: still cameras can shoot HD video, video cameras can capture high quality stills, and data storage costs continue to fall. In the future, it might become commonplace for people to make photos by shooting uber-high quality video and then selecting the best still. However, as any photographer knows, selecting the best photograph from a series of photos captured in burst mode is already a challenge, so selecting a still from 30fps footage would be quite a daunting challenge.
To make the future easier for us humans, researchers at Adobe and the University of Washington are working on training computers to do the grunt work for us. One research project currently being done involves training a computer to automatically select candid portraits when given video of a person. The video above is a demo of the artificial intelligence in action.
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).
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At the Adobe MAX 2011 event in LA last week, the company gave a sneak peek into an advanced Image Deblurring feature that may appear in an upcoming version of Photoshop. Provided with a blurred photograph, the feature uses advanced algorithms to calculate the camera movements that caused the blur, which allows the program to do a very accurate unblurring of the photograph. The video is a bit shaky and the quality isn’t the best, but judging from the audience’s reaction when the example photo is unblurred, the feature works extremely well and caused a lot of jaws to drop.
Adobe is working on a full version of Photoshop for the iPad for people who need more than the Photoshop Express app that’s more designed for mobile phones. At Photoshop World, which kicked off earlier this week, Adobe gave a neat demo of the app in action, and Eric Reagan over at Photography Bay recorded the video above. It’s a neat look at how they’re trying to rethink the popular program for a different kind of computer.
Here’s a glimpse at how selecting an autofocus point works on the upcoming Fujifilm Finepix X100. The hybrid viewfinder — which overlays an electrical viewfinder view over the optical view — provides a rich user-interface previously impossible for fully optical viewfinders.
(via Photo Rumors)
