Did Apple Acquire Imsense Ltd for HDR Capabilities in iOS 4.1?

[Apple Corps]

HDR Technology

A technical question on HDR - I believe I read a post on MR that HDR is accomplished through the camera taking three rapid exposures at normal and +/- 1 EV and "merging them.

That made no sense to me - three such exposures would allow for movement / registration issues and would limit exposure as well.

My thought is that the camera makes one exposure and through software "creates" a +/- 1 EV and creates the HDR image via software technique.

Is my thought correct or.......

 

[bengladstone]

yes, Apple's bought it - "Gene D Levoff" was appointed director of IM-SENSE LIMITED on 15/07/2010 - he is listed as Director, Corporate Law. Apple Inc in 2008. Also appointed were Elizabeth Rafael (currently listed as 'officer' at Apple) and Gary Joseph Wipfler (Treasurer)

 

[parish]

Hehe, I know where that photo of the steam shovel was taken. I was there just a couple of weeks ago. It's at the Beamish Museum near Durham

 

[CFreymarc]

shocking, i thought apple's engineers know everything and just did it themselves

this is almost as shocking as Apple hiring away Palm engineers to work on iOS

While Apple has a rep as "we did it" with the old Jobs and Woz photos shown as press conferences as late as a few months ago, Apple is like any big business -- if you can't beat them, buy them!

Read the credits section of the iPhone Settings app (about three layers into the app) and you will see dozens of pages of licensing agreements, trademarks and patent claims. This is the Silicon Valley way. If you can't convince management that your product idea is good, leave the company, get funding and do it yourself.

In California, the anti-non-competition laws lets almost anyone walk with an idea that was originated at a company if said management doesn't run with it. This keeps the corner office fat-cats in check so a metal cabinet full of NDA's and non-competition agreements holding back the local and world economy from progressing.

In many cases, these little technology companies that are acquired by Apple were started by ex-Apple employees. They then complete a hero-s arc folding back into the six colors sometimes two or three levels of management where they were before.

The funniest is when you come back in and the boss that turned down your idea now reports to you! Did that with one guy that even had a Ph.D. and was more worried about his performance review and mortgage payments than doing the next big thing. He ended up transferring to anther group rather than reporting to me! LOL!

 

[carmenodie]

The pictures on iPhone are already superb.but that hdr stuff is awesome!
I emailed pictures to my hotmail from my ip4 and opened them up on my iPad.Daaaaaaaaamn!
I'm in awe of the quality.

 

[CFreymarc]

A technical question on HDR - I believe I read a post on MR that HDR is accomplished through the camera taking three rapid exposures at normal and +/- 1 EV and "merging them.

That made no sense to me - three such exposures would allow for movement / registration issues and would limit exposure as well.

My thought is that the camera makes one exposure and through software "creates" a +/- 1 EV and creates the HDR image via software technique.

Is my thought correct or.......

You are right. My take is they were picked up for their image processing patent suite so no one else could have it. The price was less that attorney and court fees. Worked out well for all as I see.

 

[AmpSkillz]

Anyone else notice that even with the HDR turned off 4.1 takes better pictures than 4.02

after I upgraded to 4.1 I took a few identical pictures with me and my GFs iPhone 4s while she was on 4.02 still and all of mine looked better IMO in regards to tone and shading even with HDR off

there was an obvious difference

 

[skeep5]

HDR is awesome, who cares where they got it from i love it.

 

[fxtech]

Not HDR images

While the iPhone 4's camera does generate true HDR images...

A "true" high dynamic range image would be one that contains more dynamic range, and subsequently be editable in image programs that can edit HDR imagery, as RAW or floating point image data.

The iPhone does not generate HDR images. It combines multiple exposures in a way to bring out more information, but generates a plain old JPEG as a result, which is NOT a high-dynamic-range image format.

 

[damarsh]

The HDR feature is a nice addition but its not true HDR... they should have just called it advanced exposure or something. Im not a massive fan of the effect but have found that it is quite handy when taking pictures of people against the sun. Keep up the features apple

 

[alent1234]

While Apple has a rep as "we did it" with the old Jobs and Woz photos shown as press conferences as late as a few months ago, Apple is like any big business -- if you can't beat them, buy them!

Read the credits section of the iPhone Settings app (about three layers into the app) and you will see dozens of pages of licensing agreements, trademarks and patent claims. This is the Silicon Valley way. If you can't convince management that your product idea is good, leave the company, get funding and do it yourself.

In California, the anti-non-competition laws lets almost anyone walk with an idea that was originated at a company if said management doesn't run with it. This keeps the corner office fat-cats in check so a metal cabinet full of NDA's and non-competition agreements holding back the local and world economy from progressing.

In many cases, these little technology companies that are acquired by Apple were started by ex-Apple employees. They then complete a hero-s arc folding back into the six colors sometimes two or three levels of management where they were before.

The funniest is when you come back in and the boss that turned down your idea now reports to you! Did that with one guy that even had a Ph.D. and was more worried about his performance review and mortgage payments than doing the next big thing. He ended up transferring to anther group rather than reporting to me! LOL!

MS is the same way

in the 1990's i went to help and about in IE and it's licensed from too many companies to read. My estimate is that 50% of the WIndows OS is licensed from third companies. the storage functionality is licensed from Veritas/Symantec. RDP is from Citrix. and the list goes on and on

 

[darrenbeige]

A technical question on HDR - I believe I read a post on MR that HDR is accomplished through the camera taking three rapid exposures at normal and +/- 1 EV and "merging them.

That made no sense to me - three such exposures would allow for movement / registration issues and would limit exposure as well.

My thought is that the camera makes one exposure and through software "creates" a +/- 1 EV and creates the HDR image via software technique.

Is my thought correct or.......

No, it is actually taking three photos, one normal, one two stops under and one two stops over. It just does it very quickly. When you see "Saving", it's just doing the merging - the actual photo taking has already happened.

 

[Bevz]

I guess that's good news for everyone who worked at Imsense (?) - Either way, i'm glad they did because the photos it produces are fantastic! It's really improved the quality of the images!!

 

[techapocalypse]

i gotta say i didn't think i'd used HDR photos, but i took a ton at the beach this weekend and they all looked great. Just wish it went a little faster.

 

[damarsh]

A technical question on HDR - I believe I read a post on MR that HDR is accomplished through the camera taking three rapid exposures at normal and +/- 1 EV and "merging them.

That made no sense to me - three such exposures would allow for movement / registration issues and would limit exposure as well.

My thought is that the camera makes one exposure and through software "creates" a +/- 1 EV and creates the HDR image via software technique.

Is my thought correct or.......

Yes. ive got a picture I took where the man was moving and he has 2-3 heads!!! the shutter speed is fast but not perfect.

Hence my argument why this is not true HDR and actually exposure compensation

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

HDR looks good, but I see the primary use for technical applications and security cameras. When I do art photography, I like to hide stuff in shadow. HDR brings out detail but it kills contrast.

Easily solved in post production, where the extra detail would be appreciated. The only problem would be is if the images were combined in an unnatural way.

 

[inket]

No, it is actually taking three photos, one normal, one two stops under and one two stops over. It just does it very quickly. When you see "Saving", it's just doing the merging - the actual photo taking has already happened.

Yes, and this is why HDR is not supported in previous iPhones because their shutter speed is too slow.

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Yes. ive got a picture I took where the man was moving and he has 2-3 heads!!! the shutter speed is fast but not perfect.

Hence my argument why this is not true HDR and actually exposure compensation

Fundamentally, that's not true. It takes multiple photos and combines them to achieve the final result. It is not a simple exposure correction. If you were to do HDR with an SLR you would *still* need multiple photos, and if there were movement in between them, it would still show in the end result.

Besides, this is HDR for the masses. You will always achieve a better result using dedicated software and professional hardware.

 

[mdude85]

"While the iPhone 4's camera does generate true HDR images by combining three separate exposures into a single image, technology like eye-fidelity can help the HDR process maintain a realistic appearance for the final photos."

Semantically speaking, the iPhone's camera generates tone-mapped images, which allow HDR images to be displayed on LDR screens such as the iPhone display. If the iPhone did generate an HDR image, it wouldn't be available for download by the user because it would be discarded in the process of tone-mapping it for the iPhone display.

 

[iammikeDOTorg]

This one feature has made my iPhone my primary camera.

+1.

I have a nice Canon point and shoot for travel that's going to be finding its way to CL or eBay in the next few weeks. Still have to keep the dSLR around, though

 

[capoeirista]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Yeah UEA!! my old uni! 'Do Different'.

 

[Glideslope]

You really have to admire Apple for how they find the "needles in the haystacks".

+1.

 

[neutrino23]

HDR looks good, but I see the primary use for technical applications and security cameras. When I do art photography, I like to hide stuff in shadow. HDR brings out detail but it kills contrast.

I pretty much agree, but in use this saves both the HDR and the original photograph. After the fact you can choose the one you like or use PS to blend them as desired.

 

[Cavepainter]

I honestly don't know why an iphone beat expensive DSLRs to the market with this. Pretty amazing. I've wanted this technique to be in affordable cameras for years.

Looks like apple picked this one up for a song too. For a main selling point, they got this one for practically free. Maybe they'll license the tech to Canon, Nikon or some other camera company and make even more money on it. Smart company.

 

[HyperZboy]

We'll know if Apple acquired them if the FLICKR account gets deleted by tomorrow!

And Steve Jobs will probably fire the person who missed deleting it! LOL