Personal imaging is the continuous realtime capturing, archiving, recording, and sharing of personal experience through images. Typically the images are accompanied by other media such as audiovisual streams, or with textual narratives such as diaries, and often in an interactive way, i.e. people viewing the images comment on the images in realtime while they are being captured, so as to influence the capture process.
Personal Imaging is a camera-based computational framework in which the camera behaves as a true extension of the mind and body, after a period of long-term adaptation. In this framework the computer becomes a device that allows the wearer to augment, diminish, or otherwise alter his or her visual perception of reality. Moreover, it allows the wearer to allow others to alter his or her visual perception of reality, and therefore becomes a communications device.
Mediated reality arises, for example, through the eyeglass-based version in which the glasses absorb and quantify incoming rays of light, process this visual information, and then reconstruct new rays of light in response to the processing. In a fully-mediated reality environment, the wearer of the glasses would be blind to the outside world, but for the processing that is inserted between the analysis and synthesis portions of the glasses.
Personal imaging use covert capture of extremely high‐resolution photorealistic images is presented. These “lookpaintings” become photographic/videographic memories that may, at times, exceed the quality attainable with even large and cumbersome professional photographic film cameras, yet they may be captured through a device that resembles ordinary sunglasses. The method is based on long‐term psychophysical adaptation using a covert sunglass‐based reality‐mediating apparatus, together with two new results in image processing. The resulting environment map may be explored by one or more remote participants who may also correspond and interact with the wearer during the actual shooting process, giving rise to computer supported collaborative (collective) photography, videography, shared photographic/videographic memory, etc.
Applications
Personal imaging, when worn regularly, could become a “visual memory prosthetic” and perception enhancer. With its spatial filtering capability, a head-mounted apparatus can assist partially sighted individuals. Using a visual filter such as this in the personal visual assistant may help a person with very poor vision to read. The central portion of the visual field is hyperfoveated for a high degree of magnification while allowing good peripheral vision.
Personal imaging having an image frozen in space in front of your eyes. People often remember faces better, because a frozen image tended to remain in people’s memory much longer than a moving one. Perhaps intelligent eyeglasses of the future will anticipate what is important to us and select the sampling rate accordingly to reveal salient details.
Recently the apparatus of personal imaging has been gaining social acceptance. It’s attribute this partly to miniaturization, which has allowed to build much smaller units, and partly to dramatic changes in people’s attitudes toward personal electronics. With the advent of cellular smart phones, wearable device, and so forth, such devices may even be considered fashionable.