Photography Bay has dug up an interesting patent filed by Canon regarding “Iris Registration”. The patent titled “PICTURE TAKING APPARATUS AND METHOD OF CONTROLLING SAME” (Pub. No.: US 2008/0025574 A1) details a mechanism for a camera to capture an image of a photographers iris and embedding it in the pixel data of the images they take.
“Another object of the present invention is to provide an imaging apparatus that makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer for the purpose of personal authentication and writing this photographer information to the image of a subject without affecting processing, and in a manner transparent to operation, at the time of photography.
According to the present invention, the foregoing object is attained by providing an imaging apparatus for taking an image of a subject by an image sensing device, comprising: registration means for allowing a photographer to register his/her own biological information in advance; storage means for storing the biological information; and personal-data recording means for recording the biological information in a photographic image.”
Interestingly enough the patent details: a camera registration system that supports multiple photographers, how the information is stored and how this storage of information minimizes processing delays at the time of image capture.
All in all this is a pretty elaborate way to tie a user to a photo. I wonder how well it stands up to someone taking a screen capture of an image. It’d be a shame to have all that technology being undermined by such a simple action.
[tags]canon, patent, iris, registration, copyright, imaging, metadata, biological, protection, technology, camera, dslr, slr[/tags]
That’s pretty cool. I wonder if you would have to put a disclaimer on your Ebay auctions then – “camera pre-imprinted with ‘x’ iris ID’s” 🙂
@Mark It’ll be interesting to see how online services like eBay embrace this type of technology. The fact that it is being patented raises the concern that it may not be widely adopted by trade groups or online services like eBay if only one company is employing it. If there are multiple formats of this type of technology and it becomes proprietary I wonder if it’ll ever take off.
Expanding on my comment about screen captures…
The big litmus test with this technology… how well does the embedded information survive not just a screen capture, but resizing and resaving. This is the number one way in which my work is constantly infringed and I go above and beyond to frame, label and watermark my images. In all honesty I fear this great technology will be completely undermined by the most simple of computer functions… the screen capture.