Photographic technology has long since been able to nullify the red-eye effect, and now Japanese venture firm Morpho looks to deliver what could be the next big innovation in clearer images.
The company revealed the new video processing technology at this year's Mass-Trans Innovation Japan convention last week in Chiba, Japan. Marketed as Morpho Dehazer, it's capable of removing visually obstructing particles like snow, dust and mist from digital camera sources, leaving a new, clearer image.
The Dehazer technology is designed for mass transit vehicles like trucks and trains -- areas such as train platforms, mountain lodges, harbours and highways, where unimpaired monitoring is a high priority, are the main focal points of the technology. With higher visibility, especially for snowy mountain areas, highways and increasingly polluted metropolitan areas in Asia, emergency services will have a clearer view of incidents or may respond more efficiently to traffic re-routing.
Some of Morpho's other technology was integrated into Samsung's Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+ smartphones. The devices utilised Morpho Hyperlapse, which stabilises the frame of videos taken while moving, and PhotoSolid, which counters motion blur found in photos by combining several different images to create one blur-free one.
Morpho's Dehazer functionality will eventually come to the consumer world, as the company intends to apply the same technology to autonomous vehicles in the future, enabling clearer, obstruction-free video signal for the wave of incoming driverless cars that are currently being developed. Other applications may include home surveillance.