Articles tagged "research"

A study co-authored by researchers from the University of Sheffield and Lancaster University has found "complex benefits" associated with taking one image per day and sharing it with an online community.

The 'semantic image segmentation model' categorizes every pixel in an image and assigns it a label, such as “road”, “sky”, “person” or “dog.” And now, Google has released its latest version as open source, making it available to any developers whose apps could benefit from the tech.

Researchers at Harvard have made a huge breakthrough in metalenses—flat 'lenses' that use nano structures to focus light—making it possible these flat lenses will some day replace the bulky, multiple-element lenses we use today.

Google's NIMA (Neural Image Assessment) model ranks photos on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of technical and aesthetic quality. In testing, its rankings closely match scores assigned by human judges.

Researchers with the University of California, Santa Barbara and NVIDIA have developed a new type of 'computational zoom' tech that will let you change a photo's perspective and focal length in post.

Researchers at Stanford have revealed a new '4D camera system' built for robots. The system is based on the same light field tech that allowed Lytro cameras to refocus images after they were taken.

How confident are you that you can spot a manipulated photo? A recent study at the University of Warwick shows that many people are pretty bad at it.

New research on how bees perceive color might some day revolutionize how digital cameras judge ambient light conditions, producing more realistic and consistent colors.

Prisma, but photorealistic rather than painterly: researchers at Cornell and Adobe have presented a new method that uses deep learning to transfer the style of one photo to another. Read more

Using 3D printing to create ultra-precise micro-lenses directly on a CMOS sensor might one day help drones see the way eagles and other predators do. Read more

A new system by Google based on neural networking is capable of adding detail to very low-resolution images. Read more

A research team at Google has developed a way to use neural networks to compress image files in a more efficient way than current methods by building an artificial intelligence system and training it with random images from the internet. Read more

Online product reviews are a huge part of our lives these days, and often, they're the nearest thing we get to a 'hands on experience' before we buy something. But how do we know they're honest? Dishonest reviews are a serious problem for retailers (and indeed for content websites like dpreview.com) and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been investigating why people are driven to leave reviews of products that they haven't actually used. Their findings might just surprise you. Click through to read more. 

Engineers have developed a curved camera designed to mimic insects' compound eyes. The hemispherical design gives a wide field-of-view with no aberrations and effectively infinite depth-of-field, with the hope it could be used in applications such as endoscopy or as visual sensors on unmanned aircraft. The current design uses 180 light-sensitive elements, each behind its own lens, but researchers hope to build one with 20,000 elements, giving a similar resolution to that seen by dragonflies.

Scientists in Texas have demonstrated a way of 'painting' rechargeable lithium-ion batteries onto surfaces, greatly expanding the potential for future development of portable electronics. The team, from Rice University, has succeeded in painting batteries onto a range of different surfaces, including common household objects, with 'no surface conditioning'. The batteries are made up of five layers measuring just 0.5mm thick in total and, according to the scientists that developed the technology, can be fabricated using conventional spray-painting equipment and techniques.

Scientists have successfully constructed a digital camera that can be flexed to focus an image, allowing its use with simple single-element lenses. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign created a 16 x 16 pixel array on an elastomeric backing that can be distorted to correctly focus the image from a simple lens. In a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they combine this with a single-element, tunable lens to provide a camera with very simple optics capable of zooming. The technology could eventually provide 'studio quality' images from cellphone cameras, one of the lead researchers says.