Apple wins patent on 3D object-recognition technology http://t.co/1rg8SO3I

Apparently one of the patents Apple acquired when they purchased Polar Rose last year.

The USPTO has awarded Apple a patent on 3D object-recognition technology that goes well beyond the current face recognition already included in apps such as iPhoto and the iOS 5 camera application, allowing a device to “build” a 3D face or object by analyzing the curves, contours and shadows of a 2D image. Such technology would give Kinect-like detection and recognition capabilities to cameras such as those found in iOS and Mac devices.

The technique could be used, for example, to create biometric logins that only unlocked the device when the owner was identified (though as with other such techniques, keeping the device able to distinguish the actual owner versus a picture of the owner would be the key to real security). It could also be used to automatically take and upload timed pictures of users who were not the owner, or lock out machines when the owner’s face was not detected. Apple mentions also being able to identify persons who are not aware that they are being recognized.

Those who know me will realize that I’m thinking of how we can apply this technology to production metadata. Facial identification is a powerful tool if it’s accurate, and the ability to recognize more objects will give us even more metadata to feed into identifying and editing algorithms.

Two stories today that caught my attention are:

Facial Recognition App Detects, Captures Smiles Technology intrudes more & more into “human” territory

Meet Swivl, The Motion Tracking iPhone Dock That Always Keeps You On Camera More and more automatics!

Now, it would be really cool if Swivl tracked you and kept you on camera using facial detection but it does not: instead it uses a hand held transmitter/controller to “know” where to point the camera.  Even with that it will make a great addition to a video blogger, web episode producer as the producer/talent can move and have the camera follow them as they do.

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How I automated my writing career http://t.co/Q7ld3YHH

Naturally, any automation of “creative” processes interests me because I believe that some parts of the creative process of video postproduction can be automated. However, author Robbie Allen is right when he says: (more…)

The New iPhone’s Face Recognition Capabilities Could Redefine Privacy http://t.co/WayE1Abv

Following on the heels of yesterday’s post about facial recognition in the cloud here’s information on how Apple are applying the technology they gained when they acquired Polar Rose last September, at least within iOS frameworks.

When coders dug through Apple’s beta versions of iOS5 they found what were deemed to be “highly sophisticated” API systems that let an iPhone automatically track eye positions and mouth positions (so the angle to the user, and possibly where their attention is being directed could be calculated) as well as passing key data on to a face recognition algorithm that would be accessible to all apps…not just Apple’s own.

Combine this with the Nuance-licensed voice recognition technology in Siri – also new with iOS 5 and iPhone 4S – and we have the foundation of a very powerful metadata generation system that would automate naming people in clips and form the basis of speech transcription and then keyword extraction.

In my dreams these are technologies that will come to Final Cut Pro X 10.2 or 10.3 in future years.

Warner Bros puts your face in Facebook Web series http://t.co/oEFDAhcK

Back in the mid 1990′s my email sig line read (for a while) “Dynamic Media Evangelist’ because I was a serious advocate of interactive media of the lean forward, get involved kind. Well, disappointment after disappointment followed and I realized that, for most people, the act of “watching video” was a lean back, turn off act, not an active one. (more…)

Facial recognitiion in the cloud http://t.co/kznweJhC

At one level this is kind of scary – these were the folks who discovered a Social Security number way too often, from a casual photograph in the street – at the level of production automation it shows the direction we’re heading for automatically generating metadata for postproduction. (more…)

Blackmagic Design are using three “hero” shots for most of their website and press ads in support of the very excellent DaVinci Resolve. (more…)

In the mid 1990′s my Australian company made the decision to purchase a Media 100 system. That remains the best business decision I ever made (and selling it to jump to Final Cut Pro 1 was the second best business decision). It also meant we were migrating from Amiga computers to Macs. Given that I already had a graphic designer on staff for titles, illustrations and animations, I decided to delight clients by having our designer create a full color slick for the (then) VHS deliverables. (Masters simply got descriptive labels.)

Until that point we’d only done black and white printing, and it’s easy to proof what you’re going to get on a B&W laser printer. Not so with color. Color output wasn’t as common then as it is now and we didn’t get the first Kinkos until very late in the 1990′s, so we really only had one choice for our runs of 2-3 covers for each job.

This became a serious problem when – while developing a food product for my parent’s company during the period I managed it (in addition to my own two companies) – we needed a very specific purple on mockup packaging we were presenting to food buyers at the national department store chains in Australia. Cadbury – Australia’s biggest chocolate company – have always used a specific purple in their packaging, and had just spent several million dollars on a campaign that heavily featured this purple. Since the new product was a chocolate variation on a traditional English Christmas Pudding, having the purple match was beyond important. And we got blue-purple, and red-purple: seemingly every color except the one we wanted. (more…)

I was working in Final Cut Pro X today and discovered a little trick with Smart Collections.

Smart Collections can be dragged from Event to Event.  You probably already knew that, but it was new to me.

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Three authors, three examples of the disruption in publishing http://t.co/ldzT3lx

Both book publishing and film/television are industries that were built on scarcity, that are being disrupted n an age of non-scarcity. That’s not to say that there isn’t success and money to be made in the traditional businesses, but book publishing is an interesting place to look for parallels to television (particularly).

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