By Allen Tsai | Fri Apr 15, 2005 10:32 am |
A new technology has just been released called Imagener that enlarges pictures without losing quality. Kneson Software has developed a way to analyze more of the image than old enlargement methods to give mobile phone photos new life.
Cell phone photos often do not have enough resolution to deliver acceptable printout results. Cell phone cameras tend to make images at 160 pixels per inch. The acceptable range of resolution for printing is in the 300 dpi range. Most commercial programs use a technique called bicubic interpolation to figure out how to add pixels that will increase resolution. Bicubic compares immediately adjacent pixels to the one being enlarged which starts to show those blocky squares above 200% enlargement. Even the most expensive commercial programs do not have enlargement capabilities beyond this bicubic method.Imagener's Progressive technology analyzes pixels well removed from each targeted pixel and then estimates how colors change based on overall image patterns. This fills in areas with pixel colors based on much more image information than current enlargement methods, and enlarges cell phone photos to printable quality. "Before now there was really no way to get cell phone snapshots into frames and up on the wall," said Donald Henderson, president of Kneson Software. "You can enlarge in small increments in the high priced commercial photo software packages, but results are often not sufficient for printing. Another option is to take the digital file to a photo kiosk for printing, but these also use bicubic enlargement methods." Improvements in enlargement methods have lagged behind other digital image technology developments. Today, the advent of evolved object-oriented computer programming languages like C++ has allowed the development of much more sophisticated means of enlarging digital images like those from cell phones. Products like Imagener extend the usefulness of cell phone photos closer to images from traditional and multi-megapixel digital cameras.
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