Ho John Lee’s Weblog

A team at Honam University in Korea has developed a low cost wide angle lens that provides the wide field of view associated with fisheye lenses, but with much lower distortion. The image above is from a wide angle camera mounted on the ceiling of a university book store. Notice the relatively straight lines of the book shelves, in contrast to the curving distortion associated with a fisheye lens.

There are already various software solutions for remapping lens distortion from captured images, but this is a much more elegant approach performing the mapping in analog space before the image is sampled. There is still a blind spot at the center of the image, where the camera blocks the conical miror.

I seemed to have missed this feature when the most recent line of Photosmart cameras came out a few months ago:

They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

Just the thing for making your own Katie Couric-style portraits…

Data Compression Blog notes an updated release of the open source IIPImage Server.

There are some fun demos of interactive browsing through very high resolution satellite and Hubble telescope imagery of Earth, the Orion Nebula, and M101.

I haven’t kept up with IIP since wrapping up work on it many years ago (back at HP), so it’s interesting to see it still has a bit of life. The original implementation was done around 1996, before XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, and all of today’s Web 2.0 underpinnings. It’s amazing to look back and see how much internet software infrastructure has become widely deployed in the past ten years. I suspect we’d consider an implementation approach similar to Google or Yahoo Maps if the effort were started today, but I’m glad to see people find IIP useful.

I dropped my subscription to the ACM Graphics SIG some time back, so this is the first I’ve heard of this project, which is very cool. Take your photos now, and decide what to focus on later.

From Wired News, via A Venture Forth:

A computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford University has outfitted a 16-megapixel camera with a bevy of micro lenses that allows users to take photos and later refocus them on a computer using software he wrote.

The system works by capturing information about the direction of the incoming light, as well as the intensity. This is then used to compute the image that would have been formed if the sensor was in a slightly different plane, effectively changing the focal length. The paper published by Ren Ng and team observes:

I’m not very good at Photoshop, but this portfolio of photo retouching projects by Glenn Feron nicely illustrates the disconnect between reality and the beautiful Photoshop-enhanced images that fill today’s advertising and print media. You can view his before-and-after images by moving your mouse back and forth, some of the differences are quite striking. These images were all part of various commercial projects, but if you have a favorite photo you can apparently send it to him for the full treatment. I’m not sure how well this works when you start with normal-looking people, though. All of the “before” photos are of professional models who look pretty good to start with.

For those who want to play along at home, you can read more about how to remove wrinkles, and blemishes, plump up lips, whiten teeth, tidy up loose hair, add contours, and generally glamourize your photos in these articles:

Stopped by the Mobile Monday meeting at Yahoo this evening. This evening’s session looked like fun, as the theme was “Mobile Photos”, combining a couple of my current interests. Quick notes:

Some the general trends targeted by mobile photo services:

• Mainstream arrival of digital photography
• Impending arrival of megapixel+ phone cameras
• Increasing availability of network connectivity
• Rise of social software applications
• Changes in online attitudes and habits of society - it’s not considered weird to meet people online
• Change from photos mostly documenting events to photos of incidental, serendipitous memories

The slate of speakers / demos:

Erik Weitzman, Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com)
Heather Champ, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
Rich Gossweiller, HP Labs/Plog (http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/Plog/PLOGPage.htm )
Chris Dury, ScanR (http://www.scanr.com)
Mike Prynce, Mobido (http://www.mobido.com)

Here’s how to make a movie from Google Earth, using a DirectX capture utility. (via LifeHacker)

Starting with the free version of Google Earth, I installed FRAPS, a program that saves the video from programs that use DirectX (mostly games) directly to the hard drive in an uncommpressed avi format. Works real nice, makes good quality movies, but with a very large file size. FRAPS uses a codec that can not be read by anything else. So, using VirtualDub (installed on the same PC as FRAPS), I converted the avi to a much smaller Divx Avi. From there I could edit/play the video on anything, like my Mac!

The tool chain used here is pretty obscure for a normal person, but is probably usable by an interesting fraction of the early adopters that have jumped on the new interfaces for Google Maps / Google Earth.

The Voltaic Backpack is a little pricey (US$229), but would be just the thing for putting together a field survey kit for building rural wireless networks, disaster assessment (e.g. post-tsunami or earthquake), or other off-grid surveying applications. It provides a small set of solar panels mounted onto a backpack, which can generate power while you’re wearing it. The panels have a peak output of 4 watts, and charge a 2200mAh battery, which isn’t enough to run a notebook computer, but is enough to keep a GPS and cell phone, PDA, or camera running from the panel, and is probably enough to run a carefully chosen wireless access point as well.

There are several different backpack sizes available from Voltaic, as well as a messenger bag, but the solar panels and battery charging systems are identical for all models.

47MB and it can’t export to JPEG?

This utility provides for viewing of Canon (CRW & CR2) RAW and Nikon (NEF) RAW files as well as TIFF images and other standard image formats (BMP, GIF, PNG, JPEG etc.). The utility is split into a Windows XP shell extension which provides preview / edit / print commands for RAW files as well as a RAW viewer application

A few days ago Microsoft announced future support for RAW digital camera files. This is a welcome step toward pushing RAW access into the mainstream, but 47MB is enough to package up the entire Canon and Nikon OEM software bundles and then some. WinXP already has JPEG and TIFF support, so maybe this is driven by some temporarily legal / licensing or support issue for now (pure speculation on my part).

See also: comments on Microsoft support for RAW format at OpenRAW.org.