April 26, 2006
Red-eye age checker and Camera Fingerprints
Two amazing technologies with regard to cameras. And there is no reason to believe why either won't apply to cameraphones.
Red-eye age checker
This is another fabulous patent dug up by Barry Fox for New Scientist:
"Camera maker Kodak is adapting the technology used to automatically correct flash-induced "red-eye" in digital images to determine a person's age.
... Kodak's patent mentions previous research suggesting a correlation between age and the way pupils react to light. As a person gets older, their pupils have greater difficulty widening to cope with dim light, it says.
The company suggests that an age-verification system could take mug shots of a person from a set distance in controlled lighting, using a flash. Software would then measure the size of their red-eye dots to determine how wide their pupils are and make an estimate of their age".
Camera Fingerprints
In this fascinating new technique developed by New York University and reported on Scoopt, "researchers found that every camera has a unique "fingerprint", which makes it possible to tie an image to a particular camera or tell whether a picture has been faked". [Press Release in tech speak]
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2006/04/012181.htm