FotoNation is announcing their new Face Tracker technology at the PMA Conference next week. It's an in-camera technology that locks onto human faces in the camera's preview screen and tracks them as they move around the frame. The camera can then adjust white balance before the image is captured, helping to ensure that faces are well exposed and optimally focused and that skin tones are accurately reproduced.
This kind of technology has been previously available in only high-end cameras, but you can look for this technology to start filtering down to more affordable models.
Click on the headline of this article for the press release.
FotoNation Announces Face Tracker at PMA 2006
Tracks Faces In-Camera to Adjust White Balance and Focus Before the Photo is Captured for Optimal Image-Quality
FotoNation Inc. www.fotonation.com, one of the world's leading imaging and connectivity solutions companies for the digital photography industry, announced today that it will demonstrate FotoNation Face Tracker at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) Conference held next week in Orlando, Florida. Tracker at PMA 2006
FotoNation Face Tracker is in-camera technology that uses a radically new approach to identify and lock onto human faces in the camera's preview screen, tracking faces as they move around within the frame. The technology allows the camera's firmware to adjust white balance before the image is captured, ensuring that faces are well exposed and optimally focused and that skin tones are reproduced with exceptional accuracy. Face Tracker saves users time by avoiding the tedious and often impossible task of trying to fix badly lit and out of focus images with a computer using Photoshop or other photo software.
Previously only available to professional photographers using extremely high-end cameras, Face Tracker allows the novice photographer to create high-quality portrait pictures effortlessly. It accurately follows faces in frontal or profile positions and automatically establishes the correct image orientation. A box is drawn around the face, showing the user which face is being tracked. The technology can even track multiple faces simultaneously. It takes into account any processing speed limitations within the camera and allows sufficient processing power for the camera to run its own algorithms while faces are being detected, continuously maximizing the available resources.
Face Tracker Features:
Quickly works with down-sampled images.
Great general-purpose detection.
Scene-dependent parameters are collected and used to improve accuracy.
Can track faces in a wide range of poses.
The technology is not only reliant on frontal face detection. Once the face is "locked," momentary pose changes do not lose the face.
Allows other simultaneous processing in the camera.
Detects faces throughout the entire image.
Once a face is detected, detection takes place only in areas where a face was seen before.
Predicts and anticipates face movement.
When large changes are detected, the full frame is searched for new faces.
Automatic Image Orientation.
Highly accurate: 96% correct rotation if a dominant face is present.
A voting algorithm decides the orientation when multiple faces are present in the image.
The correct rotation decision is based on a sequence of preview frames, so the accuracy is much better than a decision based on a single image approach.
The orientation algorithm can deal with profiles in final image if frontal profile has been presented.
Orientation can be stored as an EXIF Tag.
Very simple Application Program Interface (API) for easy integration into the camera. Only three function calls are needed to integrate the software into the preview chain.
FotoNation is announcing their new Face Tracker technology at the PMA Conference next week. It's an in-camera technology that locks onto human faces in the camera's preview screen and tracks them as they move around the frame. The camera can then adjust white balance before the image is captured, helping to ensure that faces are well exposed and optimally focused and that skin tones are accurately reproduced.
