No more yellowish pictures from the iPhone 12 on? Apple buys Spectrum Edge…
While Samsung is preparing to outdo the competition with a crazy 108MP camera on the S11 series that it calls “Hubble” because it has “Space Zoom” abilities, and Sony came out with an astounding new sensor to give other manufacturers a fighting chance in 2020, Apple won’t be sitting still.
This time around, Apple is preparing to improve on the color presentation and low-light capture abilities of said sensors, using Spectral’s technology for enhancing the footage from security cameras that have to operate in rain or shine, sun or darkness.
The Spectral Edge patents stem from academic research at the University of East Anglia, and consist of machine-learning algorithms that can be embedded both on-chip, and on the software side of things, for enhancing images in real time.
Apple buys Spectrum Edge for better colors and low-light shots from the iPhone’s camera
What kind of improvements? Well, “HDR-like” capture without the need for busty hardware, correct white balance, and cleaner, sharper low-light footage.
The thing is, however, that on the phone front the company needs a proliferation of camera sensors that also capture infrared light and fuse it with the regular RGB results, and such sensors were few and far between two years ago.
Right now there is no real solution for white balancing across the whole image [on smartphones] – so you’ll get areas of the image with excessive blues or yellows, perhaps, because the balance is out – but our tech allows this to be solved elegantly and with great results. We also can support bokeh processing by eliminating artifacts that are common in these images.
Apple’s yellowish imagery may be a thing of the past if the iPhone 12 employs Spectral Edge tech”