As evidenced by a new patent (number 8116586) at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Apple is working on further ways to improve the camera abilities of various iOS devices.
The patent involves estimating and removing distortion from an image. Some embodiments provide a method of editing images with distortion caused by a camera lens. The method identifies a set of geometries on a set of images taken by the camera lens. The method finds transformations for applying on the set of identified geometries to remove distortion on the geometries.
The method applies the transformations to images taken by the camera lens to remove distortions. In some embodiments the identified geometries are curvilinear lines that correspond to straight lines in the scene being captured by the lens. Some embodiments provide a method of matching distortion for adding graphical objects to images. The method first removes the distortion on the images as described above. The method then adds the graphical objects to these images. Finally, the method applies inverse transformations on the images to restore them to their original form. Christophe Souchard is the inventor.