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» Back to news release: Flextronics and HP Enhance Mobile Phone Image Quality
Below are two image pairs. All were taken with the same 3 MegaPixel camera phone module however the left were processed without the HP technology, the right with the HP Technology.
The Clock picture demonstrates a common problem with camera phones. The color tint on the wall is known as "color shading", and is a direct result of trade-offs that must be made to achieve a small lens and tiny pixels in a camera phone. HP has imaging technology that corrects for this problem, as can be seen in the HP picture of the clock on the right side.
The leaf picture shows several problems — color balance, exposure, and tone curve. A tone curve is the way the camera converts brightness levels in the real world to brightness levels in the image file. HP has a feature in its image processing called an "adaptive tone curve" that, together with HP's exposure algorithm, maps the brightness in the real world to a pleasing picture with good contrast and detail, while not blowing out highlights, without exaggerating noise (grain), and without throwing away detail in the shadows. Another feature in HP's imaging technology is its white-balance, or illuminant-detection algorithm. HP's algorithm is able to accurately detect the type of lighting in a scene (tungsten, fluorescent, sun, etc) and balance the color in the final picture for the most pleasing appearance. This scene is hard to process for all cameras because there is a lot of a single color — in this case green — that can fool many cameras.
Below are two still images taken with a high-end 3 MegaPixel camera phone currently on the market. This example shows that when exposure and processing fail, the images can be corrected with HP's image processing technology to deliver a more compelling image.
Note that in the HP picture on the right, the bowl is not washed out. Nor is the highlight on the bread washed out. Also, the red in the quilted table cloth looks distinguishably better.
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