Ratchet Up

21st Century Iwo Jimo

Ad for South African newspaper Die Burger [via Newsgrist]

Elephant-Cam

Photographer John Downer attached a camera to the trunk of an elephant, producing some exceptional images.

Help Comparing Two Images

If you have ever wanted to know the differences between two images, imageDiff is the answer. There are a lot of tools out there for comparing text, whether it be source code files or office documents, but until now there hasn't been a good way to compare images.

Have you ever* looked at tw images and wondered if you are noticing all the differences in them?

* needed to know which file format is preserving your images the best?
* wanted to know how much a photograph has been changed when you compress it?
* needed to show someone the difference between two images, but found it difficult to explain in email?
* wondered whether someone else is using one of your images or just one that is similar?

ImageDiff can do all of this for you, and more. Whether you are a professional game designer, digital artist, photographer, web designer or just use a lot of digital artwork, imageDiff can help you be more confident that you know exactly what you are looking at.

Not only is imageDiff a great image comparison tool, it is available as both a standalone utility and integrated into our next generation source control and configuration management system – Evolution. If working with digital images is part of your profession, see how Evolution can save you time and make managing your digital assets easier.

Best of all, you can download imageDiff now for FREE! Or download an evaluation version of Evolution and find out for yourself how digital asset management with integrated image comparison can improve the way you work.
With imageDiff you can:

* Compare two images and see exactly what has changed, down to the pixel.
* Compare images in different formats with each other, including JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF, PNG and more.
* Compare images of different sizes, imageDiff will scale and compare them automatically.
* Choose between four different visualization filters to highlight differences the way you want.
* Overlay the original image to see exactly where changes have occurred.
* Report the percent of pixel and color change, a great way to see the effects of image compression.
* Adjust the comparison tolerance to ignore, or allow for, compression noise and artifacts.
* Switch between larger thumbnail views of the images to evaluate changes for yourself.
* Save the comparison image for reference or to be able to show others the image changes.
* Use the full-featured command line to run imageDiff from a script or plug it into other programs.
* Configure imageDiff as your default comparison program and set up a passthrough program so that non-image files are passed to a traditional text differ. [From IonForge]

Polaroid Printer Takes Beamed Images From Camphone

Millions of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the newly minted prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed.

A tiny, battery-powered printer, top, from the company that was built on Edwin Land's Polaroid.

Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones.

This fall, the company expects to market a hand-size printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds.

Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx." [NY Times]

Googlehouse

Googlehouse is an online process that builds a house with images of domestic rooms (living room, tv room...) picked up on the internet using an image search engine.

Amped-Up Facial Recognition

You can take off that ninja mask now. A new facial-recognition algorithm created by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to recognize faces with 90-95 percent accuracy, even if the eyes, nose and mouth are obscured

.

"Most algorithms use what's known as meaningful facial features to recognize people -- things like the eyes, nose and mouth," says Allen Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's College of Engineering who developed the new algorithm. "But that's incredibly limiting because you're only looking at pixels from a designated portion of the face and those pixels end up being much smaller than the whole image. Our algorithm shows that you only need to randomly select pixels from anywhere on the face. If you select enough of them, you can produce extremely high accuracy." [...] Yang's algorithm ignores all but the most compelling match from one subject -- basically, its most confident choice. [...] The new technique could pave the way for completely new models for online advertising, new ways of annotating video and still images, and new techniques for monitoring and identifying people in public places.

Yang says he's already been approached by one startup (which he wouldn't name) interested in adopting this technique for what he calls "preannotation." For instance, this technology could automatically add family members' names to each image in a massive photo library, Yang says, saving you the trouble of flipping through thousands of photos to find that one of Uncle Bill.

It's also easy to imagine search engines like Google being interested in automatically recognizing the faces of the humans portrayed in publicly available photos, adding the image data to the textual information surrounding those photos to produce yet another dimension for targeting advertisements. Looking at a party photo of Johnny Depp on a fan site? Google could display advertisements for Sweeney Todd.

This new technique is also bound to raise a series of red flags for privacy advocates, since what Yang has developed is a highly accurate way of recognizing people even with occlusion or distortion.

With more and more cities, retailers and employers deploying security cameras in public places, it's only a matter of time before face-recognition technology like Yang's gets added to these cameras. Then the question will be not just who is watching you -- but whether they know exactly who you are." [From Wired]

Telling You No Makes It So Good

Strictly No Photography is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you've ever wanted to see that you're not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty."

[Strictly No Photography via Fimoculous]