Canon Files For DSLR Iris Registration Patent

An anonymous reader writes "Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer's copyright protection to the next level. You set up the camera to capture an image of your eye through the viewfinder. Once captured, this biological reference is embedded as metadata into every photo you take. Canon claims this will help with copyright infringement of photos online."

Comments

uh

[legoman666]

remove the meta data?

Re:uh

[NotQuiteReal]

What is an illegal picture?

"Think of the children".

Not in that way, you pervert!

Sweet

[geekoid]

Now if I need to break into someplace that use iris biometrics I can just get that from a photo off of Myspace!

Re:Sweet

[timeOday]

Practically every post here raises one of a small handful of obvious concerns. Funny thing is they're answered within just two sentences of the article:

"Alternatively, by processing an acquired biological image into a personal authentication code and recording the code in the image of a subject, the amount of personal data serving as additional information may be reduced." In other words, no, an image of your iris cannot be recovered from the watermark.

"Alternatively, by embedding personal data which is biological information in the image of a subject as an electronic watermark, falsification can be prevented more robustly." In other words, no, the information won't just be easily removed tags in the metadata.

That's right, armchair experts, Canon isn't stupid enough to develop this entire application of watermarking without even knowing the first thing about it. Surprise!

Re:metadata

[gandhi_2]

pfff. oh yeah. right. with some "magical hex editor" or something. keep dreaming.

uh...turn it off?

[Quadraginta]

Or don't buy the camera?

This is something Canon would tout as a feature of their camera, for which artists would pay a premium, so that they could more easily prove that a particular photo belongs to them.

Keep in mind these are people who (1) earn their daily bread by taking amazing photos, and (2) often have to endure years and years of dry spells before one particular photo hits the big time and generates widespread interest. They have a very strong interest in controlling the reproduction and use of their photos, so they can get paid for their years of effort. A feature like this, sort of an automatic unfakeable "signature" embedded in each frame, would make it much easier for them to prove that a given photo is their property.

You might not like that of course, but that just means you're not a photographer. Presumably when it comes to whatever you do creatively, that takes years of discipline and effort to do, and which puts the food on your table, is not something you'd like people to just be able to duplicate and distribute randomly and broadly without even asking you first.

Think of it as the equivalent of your engraving your SSN on your very expensive tools, so that if they're ripped off you can prove they're yours.

Nothing to do with copyright

[SuperBanana]

Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer's copyright protection to the next level.

No, putting your photos on a CD or DVD and then following these instructions takes it to the next level. It helps that a)you have the RAW files and nobody else does and b)most cameras encode their serial number into the EXIF data (or similar for a RAW image), and if you have proof of ownership of said camera...

I didn't see anything in the patent summary provided by the linked site that related to ease of copyright enforcement. Just:

Alternatively, by embedding personal data which is biological information in the image of a subject as an electronic watermark, falsification can be prevented more robustly.

Wow, you don't say. We can do that now- it's called Digimarc. They'll even crawl the web for you and look for images with your Digimarc watermark. Too bad it costs about a zillion dollars- their pricing model means that only a small number of pros use it (and you pay for both per-image watermarking, AND the services like web crawling.) This technology is sufficiently expensive and limited in scope to mean that it will never make it into anything except the 1D series cameras- it probably wouldn't even make it into the _0D series.

I really don't see an application for this technology, except for *maybe* press agencies, where they want to (more) easily track who took what photo. This is a fairly painless way of doing so; you no longer need to track who has what camera (Canon and Nikon provide loaners for repairs and loaners for special events, which means that no, it's not 1 person, 1 camera. Pro's also often shoot with more than one body.)

Though really, they could do the same thing with a microSD slot (where shooting preferences could be stored, too) for a lot cheaper. The only thing this gets them is more "proof", maybe- if they can somehow provide tamper-proof metadata (supposedly, the "data verification kit" from Canon provides verifiable images, but I've never seen even the most basic description of how it works.)

RTFA, it's YOU who jumped the gun...

[msauve]

the invention does not capture an iris image with each shot. In fact, it describes allowing up to 5 users to pre-register their irises in the camera. It goes on to say...

As a result of the foregoing, biological information indicative of a photographer need not be acquired every time an image is taken and, hence, processing executed by the imaging apparatus is not subjected to a load in terms of the sequence of photography. Furthermore, biological information can be registered in advance.