HDR Capture and Low-Light Assistant

archived! Trial concluded

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HDR Capture and Low-Light Assistant

This beta trial has concluded.  The app remains available in the Maemo Extras repository.

HDR Capture and Low-Light Assistant are two sample imaging applications developed at Nokia Researcher Center. The applications are based on the free open-source FCam platform* developed jointly by Stanford University and Nokia Research Center. Currently FCam is available for Nokia N900.

HDR Capture is a High-Dynamic-Range Imaging (HDRI) application for the Nokia N900, especially useful in situations when there is too much light, such as a portrait of a person with a bright sky behind her. The camera takes up to three images with different exposure settings and combines them to an image that shows the details of both the foreground and background objects, without under or over-exposing any of them.

HDR input dark
HDR input: short exposure (dark).
HDR input middle
HDR input: medium exposure.
HDR input bright
HDR input: Long exposure (bright).
HDR output
HDR output.

Low-Light Imaging is a camera application for the Nokia N900 that produces better photos in low-light conditions than you could get with a single exposure using the built-in camera application. Normally in low-light conditions you have two choices, both of them bad. Either you take a short exposure, which is sharp but noisy, or a long exposure, which with a hand-held camera or moving target is blurry. When you press the image capture button, the camera actually takes two photos with different settings back-to-back and combines them into a photo that that combines the better colors and lower noise of the long exposure and the sharpness of the short exposure.

Low-light input short (noisy)
Low-light input: short = noisy, bad colors.
Low-light input long (blurry)
Low-light input: long = blurry, good colors.
Low-light output
Low-light combined output.

Both of these applications are meant to be demonstrators of what FCam can do and there are currently no plans to develop them into standalone products as is. They are still research projects, not mature production applications. They may crash your phone and / or empty the phone battery.

 

*FCam is an open-source C++ API for easy and precise control of digital cameras. It allows full low-level control of all camera parameters on a per-frame basis, making it easy to rewrite the camera's autofocus routine, to capture a burst of images all with different parameters, and to synchronize the operation of the camera lens and flash with all of the above.