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Theories and Practices of Computational Photography

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Camera Restricta by Philipp Schmitt, 2015.

Camera Restricta is a camera that searches online for photos that have been taken nearby, and it blocks the viewfinder if too many photos have been taken at the location.

via CAN

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1 Pixel Camera by James Bridle, 2012.

"1 Pixel Camera is an iPhone application which allows the user to take a photograph, select a dominant colour from a photo, and save that colour to the camera roll for storage and sharing on social networks."

-James Bridle-

More info

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One color camera by Sandra Dick, 2009

'One color camera' allows the shutter button to be pressed only if the scene contains more than 50% of the designated color(red, green, blue).

The one color camera is a critical design concept that aims at resharpening the photographer’s look and making him more aware of the three basic colors that are the basic elements of his photographs. The camera exists in three versions: blue, green and red. Depending on the color, each camera allows the photographer to take a photograph only when the image contains enough of the respective color. When for example the green camera is pointed at something, a sensor measures the amount of green in the image. If it is below 50 %, the shutter button is blocked, and no picture can be taken. Only when the amount of green is above 50 %, the shutter button can be pressed.

-Sandra Dick-

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SenseCam by Microsoft Research

'SenseCam' is a wearable camera that takes photos automatically. 

Originally conceived as a personal ‘Black Box’ accident recorder, it soon became evident that looking through images previously recorded tends to elicit quite vivid remembering of the original event. This exciting effect has formed the basis of a great deal of research around the world using SenseCam.

-Microsoft Research-

More info Now available to buy as the Vicon Revue

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Three Phases of Computational Photography by Ramesh Raskar

Three Phases of Computational Photography by Ramesh Raskar

1. Epsilon Photography It is about building a camera that has enhanced performance in terms of the traditional parameters, such as dynamic range, field of view, or depth of field. The scene is recorded via multiple images, each captured by epsilon variation of the parameters and merged into an image that has best features from all of them. It corresponds to the low-level vision: estimating pixels and pixel features.

– Low-level Vision: Pixels – Multi photos by bracketing (HDR, panorama) – ‘Ultimate camera’

2. Coded Photography It is about building a camera that go beyond capabilities of the best possibilities of conventional camera. It reversibly encodes information about the scene in a single (or a few) photograph so that the corresponding decoding allows powerful decomposition of the image into light fields, motion deblurred images, global/direct illumination components or distinction between geometric versus material discontinuities. This corresponds to the mid-level vision: segmentation, organization, inferring shapes, materials and edges.

– Mid-Level Cues: Regions, Edges, Motion, Direct/global – Single/few snapshot: Reversible encoding of data – Additional sensors/optics/illumination

3. Essence Photography It is about going beyond the radiometric quantities and challenging the notion that a camera should mimic a single-chambered human eye. Instead of recovering physical parameters, the goal will be to capture the visual essence of the scene and analyze the perceptually critical components. It may loosely resemble depiction of the world after high level vision processing. It will spawn new forms of visual artistic expression and communication.

– Not mimic human eye – Beyond single view/illumination – ‘New artform'

Read more Examples of the three phases Paper on Epsilon Photography and Coded Photography

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Cloud Face by Shinseungback Kimyonghun, 2012

'Cloud Face' is a compilation of cloud images recognized as human face in photographs taken by and transmitted from a digital camera.

Cloud Face is a collection of cloud images that are recognized as human face by a face-detection algorithm. It is a result of computer’s vision error, but they look like faces to human eyes, too. This work attempts to examine the relation between computer vision and human vision.

-Shinseungback Kimyonghun-

Project website Project video (via comvis)

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Pareidolic Robot by Neil Usher, 2012.

'Pareidolic Robot' detects and captures faces in clouds.

(via comvis)

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Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson, 2012

'Descriptive Camera' produces printed text describing the captured image.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still "developing" in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a Polaroid print.

-Matt Richardson-

Project website

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Lewis by William D. Smart and Cindy M. Grimm, 2002

'Lewis' is the world's first robot photographer that moves, composes and take pictures by itself.

It is basically looking for skin in the image and it finds people's faces, forearms and legs and it then uses a number of techniques to decide which of those patches of skin are faces... Once it has decided where the faces in the image are, it tries to compose them nicely, something you would want to hang on a wall.

-William D. Smart and Cindy M. Grimm-

Paper published in ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 Article on BBC Article on Washington University in St. Louis Magazine

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Artificial Smile by Andreas Schmelas & Stefan Stubbe, 2009

'Artificial Smile' is a camera that captures pictures of people and replace their mouths with smiling ones.

The camera 'Artificial Smile' plays with the notion of perfection and auto-retouch. Created as a picture apparatus, it shows only smiling people's picture to be taken, irrespective of their former emotional state. To achieve this camera takes a picture but overlays it with a smiling mouth drawn from a pre-existing pool of pictures with smiling faces. To generate a maximum level of exaggeration the replaced smiling mouth impression is matched as realistically as possible to that of the initial portrait taken.

-Andreas Schmelas & Stefan Stubbe-

Project Website Article on Creative Applications Net

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Buttons by Sascha Pohflepp, 2006

'Buttons' is a camera that records images searched the internet, which have been taken in the moment the button is pressed.

Taking a photo means making a memory. Choosing a moment in time and framing a situation. Archiving it or making it public. Either way, we create a visual item that we have an emotional attachment to through our memory. Photos help us to remember moments in our past. Often they even become a memory in their own right. For many, making their moments public through services like Flickr is already part the process of photography itself, creating archives which contain a vast collection of visual fragments of individual lives.

-Sascha Pohflepp-

Project website Project documentation Artist website

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Computational Photography

"Computational Photography captures a machine-readable representation of our world to synthesize the essence of our visual experience. 

Computational photography combines plentiful computing, digital sensors, modern optics, actuators, and smart lights to escape the limitations of traditional film cameras and enables novel imaging applications. Unbounded dynamic range, variable focus, resolution, and depth of field, hints about shape, reflectance, and lighting, and new interactive forms of photos that are partly snapshots and partly videos are just some of the new applications found in Computational Photography."

-Ramesh Raskar, Jack Tumblin-

 http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/photo/

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Photography vs. Computational Photography

Photography: technique to create images by recording light.

Camera: device for photography.

Photograph: image produced by a camera.

Computational Photography

Computational Camera

Computational Photograph

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