Amsterdam, The Netherlands (PRWEB) March 24, 2014
Today, a new photo app for Android is released: Impala. The app recognizes scenes as food or architecture as soon as the camera is pointed. Scene recognition is realized by artificial intelligence running on the users phone, even before the picture is actually taken.
Based on what the smart photo camera "sees," photographic filters are automatically applied. The selected filters are optimized for popular scenes commonly photographed. For instance, when pointing the camera at people, a filter drawing anti-wrinkle hydrating masks over the faces of your friends is applied.
Furthermore, as soon as the camera detects you are about to take a picture of a handful of blueberries or a cinnamon scone, for example, it automatically applies a filter best fit for enhancing food colors. While taking photos of buildings or monuments, a filter best suited for outdoor scenes is applied. The altered lighting gives the images an edgier look.
Computer vision and machine learning applications like these demand compute power and memory, says Andrew Bagdanov, research fellow at the Universita Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. It is a challenge to get such applications to work on todays mobile devices.
A private beta version of the app was presented at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last month. "Conventions like MWC are massive technology overloads," says Edgar Cervantes, journalist at Phandroid / Neverstill Media. "Its easy to miss smaller things when you have devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5 being announced, but this Impala app is quite the hidden treasure."
The Impala app uses artificial intelligence to recognize the contents of images and videos. Besides food, persons and architecture, the software recognizes sunsets, beaches, mountains, and so on. In addition to the camera functionality, the app also has a sorting functionality. For most smartphone users, the photo section is somewhat of a mess. Once the Impala app is installed, however, it automatically starts sorting all images on the phone into themed folders.
To achieve the real time performance, Euvision Technologies is one of the first companies in the world to utilize the Qualcomm Multicore Asynchronous Runtime Environment (MARE) software library. Qualcomm MARE is a new developer programming library and API being developed by Qualcomm Research, a unit of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., to enable Android native code developers to harness the benefits of multicore CPUs on modern smartphones & tablets.
The new Impala for Android application highlights how quickly and easily mobile developers can now harness the multicore performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors when developing in native code and using Qualcomm MARE," says Samir Kumar, director of Business Development and Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Near real time and completely on device visual scene classification opens the door for a slew of rich contextual mobile imaging experiences that enables developers to create applications, helping make the Digital 6th Sense a reality.
That said, another advantage of the technology is that it can prevent recording or viewing of unwanted scenes, such as classified military objects, on a mobile phone. As a technology demonstrator, the artificial intelligence component of the app has been trained to recognize hands. In the options section of the app, recording or displaying pictures of hands can be blocked.
See the article here:
Artificial Intelligence on Mobile Phone Makes Us Look Forever Young
