Apple Developing Camera That Compensates For Tilt And Perspective Distortion
June 24, 2011
Another United States Patent & Trademark Office patent application from Apple has surfaced, it's titled: “Image Capture Device Having Tilt and/or Perspective Correction.” This is an official and wordy way to say that Apple is working on something that will help with automatic tilt correction in the iPhone camera.
According to the application, Apple has an invention that will measure distortion in an image by using a combination of an orientation measurement, accelerometer data and a distance measurement device that could be ultrasonic. The application read:
Methods and apparatuses are disclosed to correct for tilt and/or perspective distortion in image capture devices. In some embodiments, the method may include reading an orientation measurement associated with a relative position of an image capture device with respect to an object, determining if the orientation measurement is less than a threshold, and in the event that the orientation measurement is less than the threshold, correcting an image obtained by the image capture device.What does this mean for the user? This is the end of crooked pictures. Sometimes when you are on go and you snap an image on your iPhone, you may not be in the best position or you may be rushed, which causes your image to be slanted. Currently there are photo editing tools that will fix that problem, but Apple would like to make it easy and build it right into the camera. There are no ultrasonic sensors yet in the iPhone, which leads me to believe this patent is something that will be used in a later iPhone release. Hopefully there will be a way to disable this feature, just in case you intend to shoot your picture crooked. What do you think? Will this be a useful tool on the iPhone?
