Could Apple's next generation Smartphone, get a smarter camera?

Thanks to a tip off from reader Allan Hoffman, it looks like Apple's next generation iPhone may be about to get a new smarter camera.

Over at Patently Apple, there is news of 3 new iPhone camera patents filed by Apple.

The first patent addresses "Blurry Photos", where Apple's solution would be for the iPhone to capture and buffer a number of images saving the sharpest/clearest one, just as ClearCam does today.

The second patent covers "Skin Tones", and the fact that if you enhance the colour of a photo, you can affect a persons skin tone, making it look too saturated.  Apple's solution would be to implement a "Skin Tone Mask", separating the skin tone and non-skin tone regions of the image.

The third patent covers "Chroma Noise Reduction", and the possible use of a technique called "Flat Fielding" to overcome this problem.

To read about this in more detail, head over to Patently Apple.

Source: Allan Hoffman and Patently Apple.

Comments

[T-Will]

All these things in theory could be done in software, right? I wonder if Apple will "force" us to upgrade to take advantage of these new features, or if these will be available in iOS5?

[David LaSpina / JapanDave]

All interesting, but just want to remind people... It's only a patent, and the chances of them doing what they patent are small. As Leo on macbreak weekly points out, Apple takes out patents on every single idea they have and don't ever use most of them.

Still, cool ideas :)