Face Detection and Recognition is now prevalent in digital cameras which can detect many faces and even recognize those you tag, giving them preference as to focus and exposure. But Antonio Torralba is more concerned with what’s not the face in a photo: his Artificial Intelligence (A/I/) software tags all objects in an image and makes the image more easily searchable so as to be able to place the photo in an appropriate context. This ability will eventually mean that robots can recognize their surroundings, say in a house or office building, based on what furniture and objects they see around them.

Going one step further with this research, Torralba is also developing systems that can scan a short video clip and predict what is likely to happen next, based on the people and objects in the scene. This should eventually allow robots to anticipate how their actions will influence future events.

As a hobby, Torralba produces his own digital artwork by superimposing multiple images together. For example, he took 150 digital photographs, each containing a person in the center of the image, and combined them to produce a picture that seems to have been hand drawn with a pencil.

Read more about this line of research at: Physorg.

Apple has made available for free download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, a children book featuring the four singers in a fantastic land of music, humor and characters. I remember collecting these cards as a kid and it was a magical world.

Download it for free at iTunes. Note it’s a long 15 min download.

This enchanting illustrated book captures the same magical spirit found in the film. The Beatles’ journey to save Pepperland from the music-hating Blue Meanies is filled with surrealistic humor, wit, and clever references to The Beatles’ song titles and lyrics. In this iTunes exclusive, clips from the movie have been included throughout and can be viewed either embedded in the page or at full-screen. The book also contains interactive animations as well as sound effects and music clips. Download the book for free right here and enjoy it on iBooks on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.

via allthingsd

When established magazines and news sites shamelessly pilfer images online without permission, we know we have reached a point of no return: the value associated with a photograph has been permanently diminished to zero. The reasoning goes something like this: “Since anyone with a decent enough digital camera can take this [snap]shot, it therefore has no monetary value and I can use it on my site freely.”

And truth be told, in some ways they may not be that far off the mark. Digital cameras have made it so easy to take high quality snapshots of newsworthy events by almost anyone who can aim and press the shutter release button. For well-covered events, there are many such snapshots for a news magazine to choose from. These snapshots won’t necessarily win a Putlitzer Prize, but they are good enough to illustrate the story for the day. And tomorrow is another day and we’re in search for the next photo, yesterday’s already forgotten, with the photographer feeling slightly used and discarded.

Can all photographers, pro and amateur alike, band together to stop this? John Harrington over at BlackStar Rising think we can in an article titled, “Putting the Value Back into Photography”, but readers claim it’s now way too late to do anything about it? What do you think?

Read the article at: BlackStar Rising.

Christopher Schneiter over at Luminous Landscape has a very interesting article on taking long exposures at night, extending the tonal range and even using HDR the odd times. I am not a great fan of HDR with all the tone mapping pushed to extremes but the fireworks picture works very well here introducing a whimsical and fun mood to the scene, and almost looking like a giant exploding sunflower.

Read the article at: Luminous Landscape.

via thestar

As the year 2011 wraps up, theAtlantic In Focus takes a backward glance at the major events that shaped our lives. It’s a three part series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Google is celebrating Mark Twain 176th Birthday with a Tom Sawyer doodle.

The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the US Earth-observing satellite, NPP, collects radiometric imagery in visible and infrared wavelengths of the Earth’s land, atmosphere, and oceans.. It acquired its first measurements on November 21, 2011, capturing a broad swath of eastern North America from the Great Lakes to Cuba. The image shows the full scene from Hudson Bay to the northern coast of Venezuela.

Read the article and download the original image at: NASA.

via dvice