Filed under: Digital Cameras

Image attribution is big business on that tangled web of ours, but embedding digital watermarks into images is a costly and time-consuming procedure for most photographers — which is why that Canon patent application is so intriguing. The filing describes a “Registration” mode for digital cameras that embeds biometric details captured from your iris in the image automatically as a watermark — you simply set yourself as one of up to five users, look into the viewfinder for a moment so the camera can scan your eye, and start taking photos. The system embeds the metadata in batches to avoid slowing the camera down while you’re out in the field, and it sounds like the system can be modified to simply generate a verification cipher instead of a true watermark, preserving image quality. Of course, that is just a patent application, so there’s no word on when or where we might see that tech pop up, but you know photographers will be all by that when it finally hits.

[Via Photography Bay, thanks Eric]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Read the full article: Canon’s eye-based biometric photo watermarking system hits the Patent Office