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In this paper we present a new approach of all-optical extended depth of focus providing two (or more) discrete ranges of focused imaging for close as well as far ranges. The fact that the extended depth of focus is not continuous allows obtaining improved contrast in the two (or more) axial regions of extended depth of focus. The design is aimed for the cell phone camera applications where dual range extended depth of focus can allow simultaneous reading of business cards at very short distance as well as very high contrasted imaging at far range.

We note with interest the recent editorial (January 2006 JRSM1) and letter (January 2006 JRSM2). They reflect facets of the massive growth in communications technology in healthcare. The doctor-patient relationship has been affected by the information available on the Internet and the presence of self-help groups and web sites moderated by expert patients.3 Geographical—but not linguistic—barriers are becoming irrelevant. Another form of telephone consultation1 of value is the nurse-lead telephone help lines run for patients with chronic conditions by centres of excellence—for instance, the Arthritis Centre, Northwick Park Hospital and the Scleroderma Centre at the Royal Free Hospital, London. Outsourcing2 is not restricted to moving tasks to lower cost centres: the opposite may occur. For example, on-line journal submission systems have moved tedious data entry away from journals' editorial staff to the submitting authors. Similarly, digital cameras, and easy-to-use software, have allowed physicians to subsume the task of medical photography—albeit at lower quality than qualified medical photographers, who are also scrupulous in obtaining consent and meeting the needs of data protection. Regretfully, medical photography departments are being closed. The availability of mobile phones with integral digital cameras allows physicians to capture ephemeral signs at the bedside or in the clinic. For instance, a camera phone was used by one of us to acquire an image of a transient rash that allowed the diagnosis of adult onset Still's disease to be reached. But the use of mobile phones in hospitals remains contentious as they may affect medical equipment.4 Nevertheless, the widespread ownership and reliance on mobile phones makes blanket bans of their use in hospitals unenforceable. We expect the use of telecommunications in healthcare to expand. It is clear, however, that innovation should be carefully risk assessed and monitored lest the law of unexpected (and unwanted) consequences be invoked.

An inexpensive technique for realizing a three-dimensional (3D) camera phone display is presented. Light from the liquid-crystal screen of a camera phone is linearly polarized, and its direction of polarization is easily manipulated by a cellophane sheet used as a half-waveplate. The novel 3D camera phone display is made possible solely by optical components without resorting to computation, so that the 3D image is displayed in real time. Quality of the original image is not sacrificed in the process of converting it into a 3D image.

Discusses the impact of modern electronics on the consumer camera market. Looks at instant cameras, automatic SLRs and the new Kodak disc camera.

A residential door phone camera system usually employs the use of a multi-wired cable, including a coaxial one, to connect the indoor and outdoor units. Concurrently, interphone systems generally use a pair of PVC (Poly Vinyl Chloride) insulated wires. Therefore, for the purpose of converting this interphone system cable (which is already installed) into cable for a TV door phone system, a method using cable composed of PVC-coated parallel wires (each 0.5 mm in diameter and 100 m in length) has been examined under various conditions. This enables the multiplexed transmission of two-way simultaneous voice and picture signals, which are superposed on DC power, to be fed to an outdoor unit comprised, of a TV camera and processors.

A major challenge faced by the blind and visually impaired population is that of wayfinding—the ability of a person to find his or her way to a given destination. We propose a new wayfinding aid based on a camera cell phone, which is held by the user to find and read aloud specially designed machine-readable signs, which we call color targets, in indoor environments (labeling locations such as offices and restrooms). Our main technical innovation is that we have designed the color targets to be detected and located in fractions of a second on the cell phone CPU, even at a distance of several meters. Once the sign has been quickly detected, nearby information in the form of a barcode can be read, an operation that typically requires more computational time. An important contribution of this paper is a principled method for optimizing the design of the color targets and the color target detection algorithm based on training data, instead of relying on heuristic choices as in our previous work. We have implemented the system on Nokia 7610 cell phone, and preliminary experiments with blind subjects demonstrate the feasibility of using the system as a real-time wayfinding aid.

Photography has become mobile, more rapidly even than anyone could have anticipated. Only ten years ago, a journalist from a major newspaper asked for my thoughts about the new technology of camera phones. Having no direct experience with the new technology, and reluctant to engage in boosterism, my response was circumspect, although I was quoted as saying that they “could mark a change in social record-keeping similar to the 1888 introduction of the Box Brownie, the first widely affordable camera.”1 The newspaper may have understood their potential impact better than I did, because to my surprise the article featured prominently on the front page. And indeed, no phone is complete today without a camera, the quality of which has continued to improve as sales of traditional cameras have simultaneously shrunk.

This paper discusses the convergence of media technologies, participation culture and the new vernacular of mobile device photography. The pervasive and ubiquitous nature of the camera phone and smart device signify the final stage in the process of the democratization of photography that began over 100 years ago when Eastman Kodak released the first truly consumer oriented camera, the box Brownie. The low cost of the Brownie combined with it ease of use made photography a viable practice for the general public at large. The Brownie gave birth to the snapshot and vernacular photography, those captured moments in time of the everyday. The beginning of the 20th century was a significant moment in history, never before had such a large number of people had access to a camera or the opportunity to document their lives and surroundings. The early 21st century signals another paradigmatic moment, the majority of the population in the modern world now have access to a camera via their mobile device, and importantly they have it with them at all times, wherever they are. The trope of the camera phone as an exemplary everyday form of image capture carries important cultural implications, especially when it is joined up with a narrative and rhetoric of technologies fit for use for all, a certain demotic turn in photography. (Goggin, 2006). Photography has evolved from being an analogue print-oriented practice to a pixel based, screen oriented, networked experience. We are experiencing a new vernacular photography both still and video, that is unprecedented.

We conducted a user study to investigate the effect of visual context in handheld augmented reality interfaces. A dynamic peephole interface (without visual context beyond the device display) was compared to a magic lens interface (with video see-through augmentation of external visual context). The task was to explore objects on a map and look for a specific attribute shown on the display. We tested different sizes of visual context as well as different numbers of items per area, i.e. different item densities. We found that visual context is most effective for sparse item distributions and the performance benefit decreases with increasing density. User performance in the magic lens case approaches the performance of the dynamic peephole case the more densely spaced the items are. In all conditions, subjective feedback indicates that participants generally prefer visual context over the lack thereof. The insights gained from this study are relevant for designers of mobile AR and dynamic peephole interfaces by suggesting when external visual context is most beneficial.

Background The rapid expansion of dengue, Zika and chikungunya with large scale outbreaks are an increasing public health concern in many countries. Additionally, the recent coronavirus pandemic urged the need to get connected for fast information transfer and exchange. As response, health programmes have -among other interventions- incorporated digital tools such as mobile phones for supporting the control and prevention of infectious diseases. However, little is known about the benefits of mobile phone technology in terms of input, process and outcome dimensions. The purpose of this scoping review is to analyse the evidence of the use of mobile phones as an intervention tool regarding the performance, acceptance, usability, feasibility, cost and effectiveness in dengue, Zika and chikungunya control programmes. Methods We conducted a scoping review of studies and reports by systematically searching: i) electronic databases (PubMed, PLOS ONE, PLOS Neglected Tropical Disease, LILACS, WHOLIS, ScienceDirect and Google scholar), ii) grey literature, using Google web and iii) documents in the list of references of the selected papers. Selected studies were categorized using a pre-determined data extraction form. Finally, a narrative summary of the evidence related to general characteristics of available mobile health tools and outcomes was produced. Results The systematic literature search identified 1289 records, 32 of which met the inclusion criteria and 4 records from the reference lists. A total of 36 studies were included coming from twenty different countries. Five mobile phone services were identified in this review: mobile applications (n = 18), short message services (n=7), camera phone (n = 6), mobile phone tracking data (n = 4), and simple mobile communication (n = 1). Mobile phones were used for surveillance, prevention, diagnosis, and communication demonstrating good performance, acceptance and usability by users, as well as feasibility of mobile phone under real life conditions and effectiveness in terms of contributing to a reduction of vectors/ disease and improving users-oriented behaviour changes. It can be concluded that there are benefits for using mobile phones in the fight against arboviral diseases as well as other epidemic diseases. Further studies particularly on acceptance, cost and effectiveness at scale are recommended.

Visual markers are graphic symbols designed to be easily recognised by machines. They are traditionally used to track goods, but there is increasing interest in their application to mobile HCI. By scanning a visual marker through a camera phone users can retrieve localised information and access mobile services.One missed opportunity in current visual marker systems is that the markers themselves cannot be visually designed, they are not expressive to humans, and thus fail to convey information before being scanned. This paper provides an overview of d-touch, an open source system that allows users to create their own markers, controlling their aesthetic qualities. The system runs in real-time on mobile phones and desktop computers. To increase computational efficiency d-touch imposes constraints on the design of the markers in terms of the relationship of dark and light regions in the symbols. We report a user study in which pairs of novice users generated between 3 and 27 valid and expressive markers within one hour of being introduced to the system, demonstrating its flexibility and ease of use.

When camera phones are used as magic lenses in handheld augmented reality applications involving wall maps or posters, pointing can be divided into two phases: (1) an initial coarse physical pointing phase, in which the target can be directly observed on the background surface, and (2) a fine-control virtual pointing phase, in which the target can only be observed through the device display. In two studies, we show that performance cannot be adequately modeled with standard Fitts' law, but can be adequately modeled with a two-component modification. We chart the performance space and analyze users' target acquisition strategies in varying conditions. Moreover, we show that the standard Fitts' law model does hold for dynamic peephole pointing where there is no guiding background surface and hence the physical pointing component of the extended model is not needed. Finally, implications for the design of magic lens interfaces are considered.

Eventually, all printed signs and bulletins will be replaced by electronic displays, which are wirelessly connected to the Internet and cloud-based services. Deploying such ubiquitous displays can be cumbersome since they need to be correctly configured and authorized to access both the Internet and the necessary services, despite the fact that they have minimal input capabilities and may be in inaccessible locations. Our goal is to enable easy and secure configuration of ubiquitous displays such as digital signage and advertisements, which are managed by cloud services and show HTML5 content. In our solution, the display shows a QR code which, when scanned by the user with a camera phone, allows automatic configuration of the wireless network along with the content to be shown. This is accomplished by a long-term trust relation configured between the cloud service and the wireless access network. We build on existing technologies and standard protocols, including RADIUS and EAP, without requiring new software to be installed on the phone or changes to the network infrastructure.

Camera phones are ubiquitous, and consumers have been adopting them faster than any other technology in modern history. When connected to a network, though, they are capable of more than just picture taking: Suddenly, they gain access to the power of the cloud. We exploit this capability by providing a series of image-based personal advisory services. These are designed to work with any handset over any cellular carrier using commonly available Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and Short Message Service (SMS) features. Targeted at the unsophisticated consumer, these applications must be quick and easy to use, not requiring download capabilities or preplanning. Thus, all application processing occurs in the back-end system (i.e., as a cloud service) and not on the handset itself. Presenting an image to an advisory service in the cloud, a user receives information that can be acted upon immediately. Two of our examples involve color assessment – selecting cosmetics and home decor paint palettes; the third provides the ability to extract text from a scene. In the case of the color imaging applications, we have shown that our service rivals the advice quality of experts. The result of this capability is a new paradigm for mobile interactions — image-based information services exploiting the ubiquity of camera phones.

Action recognition has become a hot topic within computer vision. However, the action recognition community has focused mainly on relatively simple actions like clapping, walking, jogging, etc. The detection of specific events with direct practical use such as fights or in general aggressive behavior has been comparatively less studied. Such capability may be extremely useful in some video surveillance scenarios like prisons, psychiatric centers or even embedded in camera phones. As a consequence, there is growing interest in developing violence detection algorithms. Recent work considered the well-known Bag-of-Words framework for the specific problem of fight detection. Under this framework, spatio-temporal features are extracted from the video sequences and used for classification. Despite encouraging results in which high accuracy rates were achieved, the computational cost of extracting such features is prohibitive for practical applications. This work proposes a novel method to detect violence sequences. Features extracted from motion blobs are used to discriminate fight and non-fight sequences. Although the method is outperformed in accuracy by state of the art, it has a significantly faster computation time thus making it amenable for real-time applications.

Do you love the functionality of Web 2.0, but you hate all the rounded corners? Then we definitely have the new startup for you. Mobog, a site you might already be familiar with from their rise to prominence back in 2004, has been relaunched today, after an extended hiatus last year. The site originally undertaken as a hobby is undergoing a revival from its creator, Philip Kaplan, best known for his founding of AdBrite, the popular online advertising network. The site has a reputation for harboring a lot of NSFW content - one of the popular posters on the site is a porn photographer and videographer. The site, shortly before it was taken down in 2006, was named by FHM magazine the “#1 Most Addictive Website.” The site, at least this time around, is dominated by normal folks who want a simple solution for uploading and maintaining their collection of images captured on their mobile phones. The site functions off the Flickr API on the backend, which aleviates a lot of the scaling and maintainence problems that the site experienced before. Additionally, there have been a number of additions and improvements to the site this time around. The site now features basic community features in the lounge, a very rudimentary forum that allows the users to communicate with one another, as well as the addition of RSS feeds, allowing for easy export from the system to your web or Flash widget platform of choice of your captured images. Assuming you don’t want to do anything fancy like an RSS feed, there is even an embeddable widget that allows you to simply place your profile’s pictures on a website or social networking profile page. It’s definitely a throwback to simpler times, gets the job done, and has shown exactly how simply and rapidly powerful tools can be rolled out that were major feats of engineering a scant four years ago. © Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us digg Who's linking ? Technorati BlogPulse Google Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News, Opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]