Thursday, April 27, 2006
Kodak Focuses on Sifting Pix
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 10:00 AM
"Eastman Kodak showed off new technology Tuesday designed to help shutterbugs deal with mountains of images accumulating in their photo archives and on their hard drives. New hardware and software still in development digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to automatically organize them. Kodak declined to say when these technologies will show up in products, although the interfaces appeared rather polished during Tuesday's press conference, which marked the fifth birthday of the company's EasyShare docking digital camera. The first new technology, currently nicknamed "Scan the World," is designed to digitize old photos quickly and easily. Kodak modified its check-scanning machines -- used to process bank deposits by the dozen -- into omnivorous scanners that can process a stack of photos in a variety of shapes and sizes."
The interesting part if the software, IMHO. After the images have been scanned, they are analyzed by the software. It looks like Kodak is using a heuristic approach where some filters check to see when the image was taken, while others (working like Riya's software) check for face recognition. Clearly they have a number of other plug-ins in place as well. I'd love to give this system a spin when it is available because I now have tens of thousands of imagest that remain unorganized.
The interesting part if the software, IMHO. After the images have been scanned, they are analyzed by the software. It looks like Kodak is using a heuristic approach where some filters check to see when the image was taken, while others (working like Riya's software) check for face recognition. Clearly they have a number of other plug-ins in place as well. I'd love to give this system a spin when it is available because I now have tens of thousands of imagest that remain unorganized.
