Can I Call You on My Camera?

So it’s not really a camera phone. Rather, it is a phone camera? Argh, this could get to be confusing as I digest the news that the line between camera and mobile phones has just been blurred even more that it was in the first place. Don’t take my word for it, read for yourself:

As the resolution and imaging capabilities of mobile phones continue to climb, it may only be a matter of time before we talk of calling someone with our camera. At this week’s 3GSM World Congress here, manufacturers showed off a number of technologies that render the line between phones and cameras more blurry–but make the pictures they produce ever sharper.

Cameras typically allow a great deal of control over factors such as exposure and focus at the moment the picture is taken, whereas phones typically have one feature: take a picture. Some cameras try to give users the control they seek after the fact with a range of functions for editing stored images, but these are often limited in capability.

Two companies exhibiting in Cannes–Scalado of Lund, Sweden, and DxO Labs of Boulogne, France–demonstrated image processing software for camera phones that improves image quality in different ways.

Scalado demonstrated software to solve one of the hidden problems of image editing on mobile phones: lack of memory. While a two-megapixel image might only occupy a few hundred kilobytes of memory in compressed JPEG format, editing such images has traditionally involved decompressing them into a full-size bitmap image of about 6MB and performing operations on a copy of that image–requiring around 12MB of memory in total. If this memory is not available, then editing photos may only be possible at greatly reduced resolution, defeating the object of putting a high-resolution camera in the phone in the first place, according to Pierre Elzouki, Scalado’s vice president of business development.

The company’s Caps software libraries perform operations such as color correction, picture rotation, image compositing, and pixel editing directly on the compressed version of the image, reducing the memory required for editing the same two-megapixel image to less than a megabyte, he says. By reducing the requirement for memory and processor power in the phone, the software can cut phone costs by between $1 and $5, Elzouki says.
