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Face Detection Feature In Digital Cameras

If you have a new compact camera, take a peek at its specifications to see if it offers a face-detection setting. Typically, this option is in a camera’s autofocus (AF) menu. Face detection is particularly handy for candid shots, when you’re working quickly and are therefore more vulnerable to misfocused shots. It’s also a boon for flash photography. With face detection turned on, the flash doesn’t try to illuminate the whole room, just the people within range—cutting down on the nuclear blast effect.

Using Face Detection: With face detection turned on, the camera highlights faces on the LCD screen and then sets the focus and exposure for the subject.

Using the face-detection feature is fairly simple. As you compose your shot, your camera highlights the faces on the LCD screen and then gives you the green light to shoot. If the camera isn’t finding the person in your shot, the problem may be that it can’t see enough of his or her face. Face detection is much more effective when the camera can see both eyes of the subject; its accuracy diminishes greatly with profile shots. Also keep in mind that although face detection is fast, it isn’t instantaneous. For best results, compose your scene and then press the shutter button down halfway to activate face detection—this will give the camera time to adjust its settings appropriately. Once the camera shows that it has identified the subjects in your composition, press the shutter button down the rest of the way to make a perfect exposure.

Face detection is so simple that you may be tempted to leave it on all the time. But as with any setting, it’s not right for every situation. When photographing sporting events and landscapes, for example, you’ll probably get better results by switching to one of your camera’s other focusing settings. I recommend reserving face detection for family gatherings, weddings, and other people-oriented events." [From Macworld]

Mobile Phone Micoscopy

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. The device will enable health workers in remote, rural areas to take high-resolution images of a patient's blood cells using a cell-phone camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers.

The researchers hope that the innovation will help patients with blood disorders who live far from medical specialists get more accurately diagnosed and treated. "I wanted to make optical design relevant to today," says Daniel Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at Berkeley. Fletcher's students found it relatively easy to integrate a simple arrangement of lenses with the cell-phone camera and transmit magnified images to a laptop using a Bluetooth attachment to the phone. The work prompted Fletcher to file a patent through the university and try to make a practical microscope. The researchers say that the cameras in late-model phones are capable of capturing all the details that a doctor would need to identify malaria parasites and cancer cells. [...]

The total cost of the first prototype, built from off-the-shelf components, was $75. The current version provides its own sample illumination from cheap, low-power LEDs. The device comes in two versions: with a magnification of about 5 times, for taking images of moles and rashes, and with a magnification of about 60 times, for capturing the details of blood cells and parasites. The higher-magnification model--the larger of the two--is roughly the size and shape of a roll of quarters. Both scopes attach to the phone with a modified belt clip.

"Microscopy is still considered the gold standard" for malaria diagnosis, says Katherine Herz, a medical doctor and a fellow in health policy at Stanford University. "If microscopy could be done with portable equipment ... [it] might be adopted far more widely and prove extremely useful." [From Technology Review]

Digg Pics

The recent launch of Digg's image section has given the images on Digg a home of their own. Building on our work in Digg Labs, Stamen Design built a structure for these images to flow in and out of, providing a view of the Digg community's visual browsing interests on a moment-to-moment basis.

Pics is divided into horizontal image strips, one for each section of Digg. As users vote on these images, they flow in from the left side of the screen. Over time, a mosaic of the images that people care most about builds up, and an overall impression of digg's users' activity becomes clear very quickly. Each of the images and sections can also be investigated on their own."

[More: Stamen]

Sees-Through-Clothing Cam

A camera that can 'see' explosives, drugs and weapons hidden under clothing from 25 metres has been invented. The ThruVision system could be deployed at airports, railway stations or other public spaces.

It is based on so-called 'terahertz', or T-ray, technology, normally used by astronomers to study dying stars. Although it is able to see through clothes it does not reveal 'body detail' or subject people to 'harmful radiation', according to the designers. [...]

Unlike current security systems that use X-rays, the ThruVision system exploits terahertz rays, or T-rays. This electromagnetic radiation is a form of low level energy emitted by all people and objects. These are able to pass through clothing, paper, ceramics and wood but are blocked by metal and water. The system works by collecting these waves and processing them to form an image which can reveal concealed objects. [...]

'You see a silhouette of the form but you don't see surface anatomical effects.'

In addition, the system does not involve any of the 'harmful radiation associated with traditional X-ray security screening', according to the firm."

[Source: BBC News]

Cameras As Pills

Technology that doctors expect will help detect precancerous cells faster and less painfully also could someday take cameras to parts of the body where no camera has gone before.

Cameras the size of pills could 'put eyes on tools' for laparoscopic surgery, snake inside a bile duct or fallopian tube, or weave their way deeper inside a person's lungs than any non-surgical device has been able to go.

Unlike a standard endoscope, which is almost a centimeter wide and can only be inserted into the esophagus after a patient is sedated, a new device invented at the University of Washington consists of seven fiber optic cables encased in a capsule about the size of a typical pain killer. [...]

The camera's 1.4-mm-thick tether allows the doctor to move the camera around and pull it back up once the five- or 10-minute test is finished. Human testing of the device is set to begin in about a month at the Seattle Veterans Administration hospital.

A larger, more expensive, but untethered pill camera was developed by an Israeli company in 2000 to test for intestinal cancer. Seibel said the disadvantages of the wireless camera are that doctors have no control over its path and it cannot be reused because it completes its voyage through the digestive system."

[Source: Wired]