Future Android phones could come equipped with some fancy new camera features thanks to technology being developed by Qualcomm. The company has yet to announce its next-generation Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC), but it’s already showing off some wild things it’ll be able to do. An updated version of Qualcomm’s image signal processor (ISP) will allow for advanced camera features like active depth sensing. Device makers won’t even need to do any of the hard stuff — they can just license the technology.
With an upcoming version of the Snapdragon SoC, Qualcomm will roll out the second-generation Spectra ISP. The ISP is part of the SoC alongside the CPU, GPU, modem, and other components. Spectra’s job is to take the output of the camera sensor and process the image you are eventually shown. That can involve the use of machine learning and custom algorithms to eliminate noise or sharpen details, but Qualcomm started planning for the future of imaging last year. That’s when it launched the Spectra Module Program, which offered OEMs drop-in camera module solutions that took full advantage of the ISP.
The second-generation Spectra part will add support for three new camera modules to Snapdragon-powered devices: passive depth-sensing, active depth sensing, and iris scanning. Passive depth sensing is something we’ve seen on a number of phones. It uses two camera sensors to capture images in stereo and estimate distance in the same way our eyes operate. This feature has worked okay on some phones, but it’s usually disappointing.
(source)
No comments:
Post a Comment