Advances in computational photography are just beginning to find their way into mainstream cameras
Much of the data processing involved in computational photography is still too slow and cumbersome for an average photographer, says Kari Pulli, a research fellow at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, who is collaborating with MIT researchers. Right now, for instance, it takes time and effort to de-blur a photo after it has been shot: it still must be uploaded to a program running on a computer, because the technology has yet to be incorporated into a camera in a user-friendly fashion.
But camera technology is steadily improving. “The current cell phones have the computational power of your laptop five or seven years ago, and image quality has increased a lot,” says Pulli. And even though cameras can’t yet do things like change the lighting of a scene on the fly, some concepts drawn from computational photography are slowly finding their way into the market.
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