Kodak Focuses on Sifting Pix
By Seán Captain
02:00 AM Apr, 26, 2006
NEW YORK -- Eastman Kodak showed off new technology Tuesday designed to help shutterbugs deal with mountains of images accumulating in their photo archives and on their hard drives.
New hardware and software still in development digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to automatically organize them. Kodak declined to say when these technologies will show up in products, although the interfaces appeared rather polished during Tuesday's press conference, which marked the fifth birthday of the company's EasyShare docking digital camera.
The first new technology, currently nicknamed "Scan the World," is designed to digitize old photos quickly and easily.
Kodak modified its check-scanning machines -- used to process bank deposits by the dozen -- into omnivorous scanners that can process a stack of photos in a variety of shapes and sizes. The giant scanners are not intended for consumer sale but will likely show up in kiosks or behind the photo counters of drug stores, said Randy Fredlund, a Kodak representative who demonstrated the technology.
Along with digitizing the images, the scanning software also assigns each image a tag based on the decade in which the photo likely was taken.
How does the software figure that out? Photographic paper styles have changed over the years, and the software gauges the size and shape of a print to guess when the image was made. It further narrows down the date based on whether the print is color or black-and-white.
The scanner also reads the backs of prints and eventually should be able to pick up watermarks such as "Kodak Paper" and handwriting such as "Uncle Jimmy 1957" to help identify photos.
Kodak is also looking at the fronts of pictures, with a technology called "scene recognition." The first phase, on display Tuesday, can analyze a face in a photo and find other pictures of that person in a collection. Kodak developed this software independent of Riya, a company that already offers face-recognition software. Riya can also analyze text in photos, even reading street signs in an effort to guess where a photo was taken.
Extracting place data is still a holy grail for digital photos. A handful of cameras -- mainly professional-grade digital SLRs -- work with GPS attachments that can embed precise coordinates into a photo file. But tagging place data is still beyond the reach of consumer models.
However, Kodak cracked open a door to this capability Tuesday with its new EasyShare V610, a slim camera with dual lenses and image sensors that enable it to cover a gargantuan 10X zoom range (from 38-mm wide-angle to 380-mm telephoto) without a massive protruding lens.
The $450 V610 is Kodak's first camera to include Bluetooth wireless networking. The initial purpose is to allow photo transfers to Bluetooth-equipped computers, printers, PDAs and cell phones. But some of those phones include GPS receivers. In theory, a Bluetooth connection should allow the camera to extract location information and embed it in the photos, an idea Kodak has at least considered. "That definitely has a play," said Jens Hinrichsen, a Kodak marketing manager.
The company also updated the EasyShare-One, bumping the resolution to 6.1 megapixels and adding support for paid Wi-Fi networks like Boingo and Wayport. The camera will be out in July or August, Kodak said.
