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True Color in Real Time: The Challenge of Mobile Imaging
rocannon writes "A mobile phone with a color display and built-in camera - it's the quintessential info-imaging tool. But communicating accurate color at high-speed data rates and rendering color on displays that do not deliver even standard screen color rendition are still challenging. Kodak explains why photo and color science are as important as clock speeds and data rates in this expanding market."
Fleshtones are historically the biggest photography challenge. Glad to see that Kodak is leading the way to the pr0n of the future!
For things like this that rely on the accuracy of color, I believe analog will always (or at least for a long while) be the way to go. There is so many ways that a color can be distorted, but when it's on a simple swab of paper, the only variable is the light source. Perhaps an analog/digital combination is the best approach?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
.... porn!
We already read about this here two weeks ago.
Most geeks don't care about design/looks or anything else poingting in that direction. Geeks want features before fashion. Why should the geek care why the little distorted image looks like a smeared out stamp, the point is that the geek can take the picture, that's it, end of story. I've seen loads of cases when people spend a fortune on their computers and graphicscard. Monitor? The cheapest, biggest.. i.e sampo, samtron or hyundai. Big time degradation (spell) in image quality. On top of that, go buy a no name GeForce card and IT's like watching a TV from the late '80. Put a SONY screen with a Matrox card next to a Sampo with a noname geforce card... Yikes! Oh, I'm not a geek, i'm a perfectionist (spell)
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
Because otherwise Kodak's business would suck. With this magical message, they can make use of this (System and method for generating a universal palette) (and the other 13696 Kodak patents ?
Can anyone say "1-900-***-****"??
:)
Of course, now they'll actually need to have good looking women on the other end of the line (or they'll need to "borrow" pics of good looking women from a "reputable" porn site
Ahhhh, a whole new world! (of porn)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
So they solve data rates, they solve porcessor speed, they solve image quality - now I can really quickly download high quality images for the 10 minutes my battery lasts!
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Skin tones are hard to do because the visual cortex is wired to recognise humans and spots inconsistencies pretty quickly. I've been working with a friend who produces MMS applications for the Nokia 7650.
One of the applications was a slot machine, and it looked great! The colors are simple, and it came out fine. A lot of the content of the internet is still made up of text and icons, which don't have very stringent requirements on color.
We're still going to see a lot of money being put into palletizing for swapping photos of family and loved (in oh so many ways) ones.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
It's all more videophone sillyness. Very low res, no focus, bad optics, no imaging options, 14kbit on most lines outside of huge cities, what's the point? I can take and email much nicer photos just fine with iPhoto and a real camera. This video cell phone thing is yet another attempt to catch star eyed gadgeteers in a trap of mediocrity for the sake of modularity. "The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form?" Concentrated, maybe. Pure? Not half.
This is almost as dumb as "wireless web." WML sucks, guys. It's even more confusing that the regular web's interface, and 40% of people don't understand that. Combine it with the size limit on WML pages (1400 bytes is the max through tmobile's gateway, and the goddamn XML headers take up 100. Hell, this post wouldn't sneak in under 1300 characters!) and you've got a confusing, bland interface with no real data. Hardly the killer app that's going to change the world.
Give me a cell phone with no dumb games, a nice address book, sizable buttons, a clean look with no precarious plastic, plug & play USB interface that works with mac/linux/palm/pocketpc, and a phone plan that doesn't try to put its tongue in my ear every time I do something interesting and you'll have solved the cell phone puzzle. I'll gladly give you my $40 per month.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'm kinda concerned because all these new technologies:
* New Technologies leads to New Phones with more features
* New features results in more bandwidth
* More bandwidth equals higher prices
The consumer is the one who has to pay for all the high quality images send by the phone. This BTW also is the case for MMS. Consumers are paying quite a lot for the GPRS bandwidth used. This will eventually grow when UMTS comes to the world.
The laughing 3rd party is of course the Telco, their network already accepts these Features and can charge their customers only more for the used data.
Just my 2 cents.
Lemming
Daxy's Networking Blog
... because in porn (well, most porn) skin tones occupy a large area of the image, and are therefore well served by existing algorithms.
"Mobile phones have screens that suck, feeble processors and not enough bandwidth. So you need to be really clever to transmit a picture of someone that doesn't look weird. Give us lots of money and we might tell you how to do it".
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Agreed. I use a phone for talking and a bit of text messaging. The novelty of the games wears off after about 5 minutes. It's much more important to have features such as a good UI. Besides, what's the point with all this cameras on phones thing. I've never seen anyone try to put a phone on a camera. Probably be much easier as cameras tend to be bigger!
Recently, Kodak image scientists developed a way to meet these goals by supplementing the distribution of the input colors with a distribution of selected "important" colors [5]. In particular, they found they could supplement skin tones by appending image skin-tone patches generated from a statistical sampling of the skin color probability density function. A major advantage of this approach is that explicit skin detection, which can be error prone, is avoided.
Sounds like this will be great for photographs of white people!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My wife has used a mobile webcam I built from a tablet computer, a USB microcam, using CDPD communications.
One of the biggest problems we found was battery power, always a problems with computers, but enhanced due to the power sucked by the webcam (lots of pixels to move to the computer at high bandwidth, even if they are just to be compressed using JPEG), and the power sucked by CDPD transmission. Of course, the cam was sending out an image every 5 minutes or so, and the camera was "always on."
I think the naysayers on the camera wireless phones are totally wrong. I don't expect everyone to purchase a camera phone, but I think a lot of people (especially young people and several business niches) will. It's really fun!
The uses of a camera phone do not intersect much with a high-quality megapixel digital camera used for "archival quality" pictures. PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...a bunch of friends at a bar (which will totally change Mardi Gras!), to show a potential purchase while shopping, to show a map with directions, to see if you like the night club, or a "hey I'm in Vegas, look" call while travelling.
You know, they have software that does your spelling for you know.
But yeah, I know what you mean, there is a huge difference in image quality between various monitors and video cards. I used to have a really nice Acer monitor (nice in image quality, anyway, not in it's ability to not fall apart...). I put a cheap S3 video card in there (after they got their 3d act together) and the fucking image rippled at high resolutions. It was ridiculous!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You're right, geeks care more about features. And we all know, that to make the really big money, you need to capture the geek crowd, right?
Wrong.
The mass market for mobile telephony lies with the teenagers. Not only that, but fashion-aware teenagers. (For a significant part, this even means "females".)
Sorry to be so blunt, but your market segment is not significant when writing the requirements for a mass-market mobile product.
Out of the Palm based PDAs Sony has the best screen. Someone said here that geeks don't care about what it looks like as long as it can do it. Well I'm not buying this. What it looks like is VERY important. I wanted to by a new PDA but they still insist on 160x160 resolution with sucky colors. Why should I switch from my 2 year old handspring? More effort should be put into the displays everywhere. And not only what they look like but also how they perform battery-wise.
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
the biggest problem with cell phones is that the companies who hawk them don't offer decent service and their billing practices are worse than even the least reputable credit card scam
i've had a cellphone 2 times and both times it ended ina percieved breach of contract by them on my part because they're so fucking incompetent, even now after over a year of having no cell phone service (besides road side assistance what reason do i have for being tracked by everyone who knows me??) i'm still dealing with a collections agency who has been sicked on my by Cingular (formerly Cellular One) for a $100 when they still OWE ME $200+ from my deposit which they flat out stole from me and I have no recourse
I talked to the engineer who designed verizon's 56k datapaths (he taught my datacomm class at a community college in indianapolis) and he was the first one to tell me to avoid them like the plague and gave numerous examples of their unscrupulous behavior as well
why not take that $50 a month and do something useful with it like investing it or anything other than funding huge evil corporations
i've even seen people picketing with signs out in front of cellphone stores here in cincinnati trying to ward people away from the absolutely vicious and illegal practices which they *all* have.. when someone is that dedicated, to take time off of work and have his kids there with signs as well you know that he got fucked over and ii'm sure he and i and a lot of you are not alone.. so ask yourself do you really need that cell phone? and if so you do you really need one that has shitty distorted video and a 1 hour battery? why not get a pre paid phone for emergencies and tell them to go fuck themselves for the rest
Color mangement on PDA should be fundamentally very little different from color management on the desktop. There's should be very little new that Kodak or anyone else has to invent -- except for demand, and a sensible, standard way for device mfgs. and software vendors to solve the problem.
Color management on the desktop has already been solved, however it takes active intervention form the user to work and can be very confusing to acutally use. Apple does the best job with ColorSync, and MS is trying to catch up with ICM. Linux is a color management desert (far as I can tell).
If you use Photoshop on a Mac you can achieve a very successful color-managed workflow with very little work. It seems that the only geeks that care about color are prepress geeks. Nobody else seems to have a clue, so I'm glad Kodak is trying to prick up eveyone's ears.
In principal, the solution is simple. Use color profiles (ICC color profiles). Profiles describe how a device's colors (rgb 255,0,0) for example, map to a "real" color defintion--defined using a device-independent color space.
You need:
1. A profile for the display device.
2. An image file with an attached profile -- often called a "source profile".
3. A "color management engine" that creates the best approximation in the display devices color model of the image based on a "rendering intent" -- usually "perceptual", "relative colormetric", "absolute colormetric", etc.
The problem is that the only way to get truly relaiable profile for a display device is to put an instrument with a suction cup on your monitor and measure the monitor's actual performance. Or, for a printer, scan a print of an IT-8 test pattern into color profile building software. While Windows and Mac OS (9 and X) have buit in support for most of the color workflow, the colorimiters and profile-building software are expensive.
Unless PDA's start coming with mini suction-cupped colorimiters, then the best anyone can do is guess. Just like the sRGB profile which assumes that everyone has an old crappy monitor. That or someone will invent a way to manufacture LCD displays so that every display has exactly (in terms of statistical signifigance) the same color rendering performance, degrading predictably over time.
Not likelyl. However if it was a BW image PRINTED on colour paper (developed via RA-4) then yes, you can get a colour tone to it
:)
There are other possibilities. A true BW image is silver based - what you see are fixed silver grains. You could have that printed selenium toned, which would give you a slightly purple print and leave behind Selenium Sulfide (i think...)... which is the most practical permanent print you can make. No way for that to be oxidized and removed... very very permanent.
Now you've also mentioned development of film- yes. This plays quite a roll but believe it or not film is developed (as in research) to be quite tolerant of processing mistakes. Yeah you can give film a colour cast thru improper development but more likely than not what you are seeing is a printing error. The Pro lab I used to work for charged $4.00 for a 4x6 that was custom printed. Yes you bet that skin tone was dead on- a 4x6 machine print cost $0.46. I could make 10 of those for the same cost, and probably get to the right tone, but then you are limited by machine buttons (which was I believe 15% increments, or about 10cc (colour correction) filter levels).
Most all developing fluids are seasoned (you refer to them as aged). Thats out of necessity- it's far cheaper to buy and replenish than to mix anew, and it's also more reliable from a standpoint of quality. Occasionally you have to dump a tank and start over but that's a very traumatic experience for all involved (and usually involves running lots of seasoner (exposed but unimportant film/paper) to bring the Bromide levels back to normal).
The biggest problem in photo is metamerism from your description- how can you get a system with 3 dyes to mimic what you see in artwork where the spectrals are all over the place.... even with extremely careful colour management you are going to suffer. I think there is a place that uses 10 inks to reproduce artwork (might be you?)... it's difficult, expensive, laborious but gives great results. It's all about covering the spectrum... and 3 is good, but 10 is much better
Anyway, I've rambled quite far from BW colour casts.... post processing is most likely responsible for it.
most of you, including kodak, are not giving any recognition to a country thats been offering video over the air to personal devices for years now: korea.
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Damn. U.S. Patent 5,664,080 is a patent on the dithering that paint programs have been doing for as long as I can remember. The first claim covers reserving some entries for the GUI, finding a set of colors that best represent the original image, and dithering the image using a repeating halftone pattern. Most paint programs that I have used use this algorithm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What's different about American culture that you guys don't?_ ______
_________________________________________
Are fingers are too Fing fat to use the textpad!
Seriously though - I think the interface has alot to do with lack of use. No one I've ever met (aside from some 12 year olds) is willing to punch in a message on a 9 key keypad. It just isn't worth it.
If you couple this with our cultural propensity for rudeness - if our phones on, we're going to talk on it. It doesn't matter where - school, restauraunts, church! It doesn't give much of a reason for us to text.
I'll tell you why they'd say that right now -- because that's what their company does. They make money selling imaging devices and technology. Obviously they need to look out for and push the market for what their company sells.
I'm sure the RIAA could tell us why Digital Right Management is more important than clockspeeds and data rates -- it doesn't mean it's true :P
It seems to me this "feature", just like text messaging, is being pushed by a culture that just doesn't understand Americans. Just because SMS is all the rage in Norway and the Japan has the highest per capita camera ownership doesn't mean some asshole American like myself simply doesn't want to have just a phone to, you know, fucking talk to people.
SMS is great for the same reason email is great - it's asynchronus. I *could* leave a voicemail message asking a friend when/if we're meeting for dinner, but text messaging is far simpler. Most of the time, we're either working or in some other setting where the phone is turned off, so you can't "just talk to people" very easily.
"You mean I can take pictures of my arse and send them to my mates? That's totally worth paying for. How much?"
Cellphone owner Craig on the possibilities of photo messaging.
(The Observer, London, 22 September)
Dithering, color quantization, and palette choice have been known and in use for decades, and back then, desktop computers were less powerful than phones are today. Kodak is a late-comer to the area. I don't see anything particularly new or "enabling" in what the Kodak folks are writing about.
I understand everything in this article up to the point where they start to talk about Kodak's new compression. Do they somehow sneak info in through the 8 bits used for each pixel that allows them to use more than 256 colors? Cause if thats not it, the new Kokak compression seems to use just pre-determined pallete colors that are biased towards better skin rendition for images. And if that's it, then it seems kinda bleh, nothing revolutionary that I though it was. Maybe I'm just missing the key point...so...anyone care to elaborate for me?
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