"10mp" camera?! HDR, sports mode, night vision, and more dual-camera possibilities!

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curiousGeorge

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Feb 17, 2008
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"10mp" camera?! HDR, sports mode, night vision, and more dual-camera possibilities!

fattank said:
BlueScreen said:
1) HTC EVO 3D will isolate twin cameras to produce the firsts 180 degree panoramic photo at 5mp resolution. (Option will be in sense UI)
2) HTC EVO will produce the first ever 10mp photo on cell phone by using what is called paralax photo capture (each camera will capture an image and over lay it to produce 10mp photo) (Once again tap on 10mp photo)
3) Light sampling will be independent of each CMOS sensor to produce what will be close to night vision capture (Night Owl)
4) Camera will have a Sport mode, the 5mp camera's will function in tandem, but alternate. Each camera will burst alternately and provide crystal clear photography on high speed action events. (11 fps) I have tested this out and watch a 20ft putt go in the hole in frame, by frame increments. To be upfront burst sport mode will only work in 2d mode for obvious reasons, because the two cameras are sharing the load@5mp.
Granted that this garbage above was initially spewed by some poser who pretended to work for HTC/Sprint... some of the ideas are genuinely clever. I've added them to my own in the list below of what could possibly result from the dual-camera setup. Tell me what you think!

  • Greater detail. Using both cameras at once to capture two 5mp images and "overlaying" them is interesting. Maybe adaptively "adding" the details in one to the other? Maybe using some kind of "interlaced" trick, or maybe the tilt is a bit different so both can take pictures of 2 different [but adjacent] visual fields for "instant panorama"?
  • Greater depth of focus. Each camera can shoot simultaneously with a different focus, and the result easily combined into a picture with incredible depth of focus.
  • Sport mode (shutter speed enhancement) seems like a wonderful idea. Both cameras fire, one a few ms after the other, and the result motion compensated. The perspective difference may also be used to identify and correct for motion blur. As an instantaneous "anti-shake" this would work wonderfully, too. All in all, this would allow the camera to capture faster motion with less blur!
  • Double speed burst-mode. Burst mode could theoretically be twice as fast, since the other lens could fire during the recovery time of the first.
  • Dark mode / night owl / de-graining. A fantastic idea would be to use both cameras to capture a picture simultaneously at high ISO and use a simple perspective-corrected denoiser to drastically improve quality of night scenes, which suffer most from grain issues. Each picture is bound to have a different amount of "random noise" or "camera noise" from the two cameras, and after perspective correction (and/or motion compensation if one fires after the other), the randomness is detected and removed from the combined image.
  • HDR (High Dynamic Range) can be achieved with no additional delay by having both cameras snap at different exposures and combining the result, solving the "low dynamic range" problem with the Sensation and other phone cameras.
  • Apply all of these to video. If both capture video simultaneously, there could be some benefit in 2D mode -- timestamps of the recorded frames can allow them to be combined to produce a single video of higher effective average framerate -- again, with some simple HW perspective correction filter. It could also drastically improve the quality of night video in the same way as the above "night mode" camera use with the additional potential advantage of temporal denoising, resulting in the cleanest night video you can imagine. Not to mention the first ever high dynamic range (HDR) video on a mobile device.

It's obvious these aren't going to be included in the official ROM, but I'm sure there can be "an app for [some of] that" provided the API of both cameras are exposed. Exciting prospect, is it not? The only one of these that seems a bit hard to chew is of course the 10mp nonsense. At most the combined detail would just produce a "very nice" 5mp shot.
 
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random1204

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Aug 13, 2010
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I think what they mean by the horses, is that this is kinda crap.

It's already been known that when taking 2D pictures, it uses the top-most camera only. It uses only one. Only in 3D does it use both cameras.
 

curiousGeorge

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Feb 17, 2008
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I think what they mean by the horses, is that this is kinda crap.

It's already been known that when taking 2D pictures, it uses the top-most camera only. It uses only one. Only in 3D does it use both cameras.

Ah... gotcha. :) More than "kinda" crap, it's genuine crock, yes.

But I'm saying the ideas are so good -- the potential is there. With a system update from HTC, these can be almost trivially enabled. Otherwise, if the API for camera 2 is accessible, an app can be created to provide the remaining functionality.
 

mlin

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Dec 27, 2007
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Ah... gotcha. :) More than "kinda" crap, it's genuine crock, yes.

But I'm saying the ideas are so good -- the potential is there. With a system update from HTC, these can be almost trivially enabled. Otherwise, if the API for camera 2 is accessible, an app can be created to provide the remaining functionality.

I think these are really cool ideas. I'm sure there will be some developer(s) out there who will develop apps to take full advantage of the 2 cameras, perhaps implementing some of the ideas you have suggested.
 
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k2buckley

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Sep 24, 2010
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Ah... gotcha. :) More than "kinda" crap, it's genuine crock, yes.

But I'm saying the ideas are so good -- the potential is there. With a system update from HTC, these can be almost trivially enabled. Otherwise, if the API for camera 2 is accessible, an app can be created to provide the remaining functionality.

Yea, forget all the crap that everyone spews. Anything is possible, with the devs here on xda. As Mlin said, I'm sure there will some dev or a team of devs that will develop an app to take FULL advantage of the dual cams. Granted, I'm sure there will be plents of limits on what the cams are capable of, however, I'm sure that those limits will be pushed and that we'll eventually get max potential out of the cams.

Did anyone think we'd ever get Full HDMI mirroring working on the OG Evo?
 
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k2buckley

Senior Member
Sep 24, 2010
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Sounds good but nobody seems to care about the camera, look at aosp cameras :(

Good point. But hopefully the actual camera hardware on the 3D will be quite nice, so more will be able to be done with it. Hopefully. I would think that there could be more potential to be unlocked in the cams, but who knows.
 
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oldjackbob

Senior Member
Jun 5, 2010
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  • Greater detail. Using both cameras at once to capture two 5mp images and "overlaying" them is interesting. Maybe adaptively "adding" the details in one to the other? Maybe using some kind of "interlaced" trick, or maybe the tilt is a bit different so both can take pictures of 2 different [but adjacent] visual fields for "instant panorama"?
  • Greater depth of focus. Each camera can shoot simultaneously with a different focus, and the result easily combined into a picture with incredible depth of focus.
  • Sport mode (shutter speed enhancement) seems like a wonderful idea. Both cameras fire, one a few ms after the other, and the result motion compensated. The perspective difference may also be used to identify and correct for motion blur. As an instantaneous "anti-shake" this would work wonderfully, too. All in all, this would allow the camera to capture faster motion with less blur!
  • Double speed burst-mode. Burst mode could theoretically be twice as fast, since the other lens could fire during the recovery time of the first.
  • Dark mode / night owl / de-graining. A fantastic idea would be to use both cameras to capture a picture simultaneously at high ISO and use a simple perspective-corrected denoiser to drastically improve quality of night scenes, which suffer most from grain issues. Each picture is bound to have a different amount of "random noise" or "camera noise" from the two cameras, and after perspective correction (and/or motion compensation if one fires after the other), the randomness is detected and removed from the combined image.
  • HDR (High Dynamic Range) can be achieved with no additional delay by having both cameras snap at different exposures and combining the result, solving the "low dynamic range" problem with the Sensation and other phone cameras.
  • Apply all of these to video. If both capture video simultaneously, there could be some benefit in 2D mode -- timestamps of the recorded frames can allow them to be combined to produce a single video of higher effective average framerate -- again, with some simple HW perspective correction filter. It could also drastically improve the quality of night video in the same way as the above "night mode" camera use with the additional potential advantage of temporal denoising, resulting in the cleanest night video you can imagine. Not to mention the first ever high dynamic range (HDR) video on a mobile device.

Even if these aren't included in the official ROM, I'm sure there can be "an app for [some of] that." Exciting prospect, is it not? The only one of these that seems a bit hard to chew is of course the 10mp nonsense. At most the combined detail would just produce a "very nice" 5mp shot.
You get an "A" for thinking so far outside the conventional box, but unfortunately I don't see any real possibility of any of that ever coming to pass, for one inescapable reason: the two cameras aren't shooting from the same location. Every concept you describe requires that both cameras see the same thing, and they don't, for the simple fact that the pictures they take are from two different physical locations.
 

curiousGeorge

Senior Member
Feb 17, 2008
661
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Saint Paul, MN
You get an "A" for thinking so far outside the conventional box, but unfortunately I don't see any real possibility of any of that ever coming to pass, for one inescapable reason: the two cameras aren't shooting from the same location. Every concept you describe requires that both cameras see the same thing, and they don't, for the simple fact that the pictures they take are from two different physical locations.

Fixed-point location adjustment is trivial and can be performed in software/hardware with minimal effort (even perspective/angle adjustment via convolution-deconvolution of 3d signal matrix). Also, even if they weren't shooting from precisely the same location or perspective, the motion-compensated technique can be applied even to different frames in a video (making 'night shots' more doable), since the temporal element is the most tricky. If both cameras fire simultaneously, tracking synthetic "motion vectors" is utterly trivial.

Even if a developer was lazy and didn't want to implement perspective correction, a subset of the two pictures near the center (where they overlap) can be used for all of the rough work, and a simple guassian averaging function can perform the spreading (or simulated annealing) from that point.

No, location is certainly not a problem -- and even perspective is fairly easy to (accurately) account for via straightforward signal processing algorithms both in hardware and software.
 
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    Ah... gotcha. :) More than "kinda" crap, it's genuine crock, yes.

    But I'm saying the ideas are so good -- the potential is there. With a system update from HTC, these can be almost trivially enabled. Otherwise, if the API for camera 2 is accessible, an app can be created to provide the remaining functionality.

    I think these are really cool ideas. I'm sure there will be some developer(s) out there who will develop apps to take full advantage of the 2 cameras, perhaps implementing some of the ideas you have suggested.
    1
    Ah... gotcha. :) More than "kinda" crap, it's genuine crock, yes.

    But I'm saying the ideas are so good -- the potential is there. With a system update from HTC, these can be almost trivially enabled. Otherwise, if the API for camera 2 is accessible, an app can be created to provide the remaining functionality.

    Yea, forget all the crap that everyone spews. Anything is possible, with the devs here on xda. As Mlin said, I'm sure there will some dev or a team of devs that will develop an app to take FULL advantage of the dual cams. Granted, I'm sure there will be plents of limits on what the cams are capable of, however, I'm sure that those limits will be pushed and that we'll eventually get max potential out of the cams.

    Did anyone think we'd ever get Full HDMI mirroring working on the OG Evo?
    1
    Anyone know which devs have said they will be coming over to the 3d to develop yet?

    http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1008413

    Search is your friend. :)

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