Rewind Android App Stitches Together The Perfect Group Photo
A nifty piece of software could soon have you taking much better shots of all your friends.
Trying to get everyone looking their best in a group photo is a tricky proposition, as someone is always bound to sneeze, blink, cough, or otherwise ruin the shot. The folks at Scalado have an idea they think might be able to help you eschew all those throw away shots. Thanks to the recent boost in processing power on multicore cellphones, they are able to handle much more difficult operations, like stitching together a series of photos in order to take one perfect one.
The app is called Rewind, and was demonstrated at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference a couple of days ago. The software captures a flurry of five five megapixel images in a single burst, and then gives you the option to zoom in on each persons face, choosing shots individually. Once you’ve gone through the group and given everyone their most photogenic look, the software then combines all the images into a seamless whole.
The software pre-caches constantly, so as soon as you hit the shutter button, it saves two images immediately prior, one when your finger hits, then another two immediately after. It then uses facial detection to zoom in on each head, and allow you to chose the best of the five shots for each person. It’s very similar to the way many ultra-high-speed video cameras work. Casio, among others, has also tried something fairly similar with their compact cameras.
Scalado is currently shopping the software around to hardware manufacturers in the hopes of getting it added as a feature to future Android smartphones.
This is a variant of the well known technique of having a stack of multiple exposures of the same shot, and then picking and choosing the best of each. However, what’s really interesting here is that it automatically detects the faces, lets you chose the best one, and then seamlessly melds them together, all on your smartphone.
[Android and Me, via GigaOm, PetaPixel]