Adobe Research

Canon breaks into the drone market with a new $40K search and rescue drone & camera combo

Apr 6, 2017 by John Aldred 5 Comments

Well, this was unexpected. There weren’t even any rumours floating around, other than a mention of a patent two years ago. Then radio silence, nothing. But now, Canon have entered into the drone market. Although it’s not the consumer drone market. They’re going industrial.

With the catchy name of PD6E2000-AW-CJ1, Canon’s new drone costs a reported $20,000. Of course, you can double that price when you add in the $20,000 ME20F-SH camera that gets mounted to it. It’s designed for search and rescue, which is probably why they chose a camera that goes up over ISO 4,000,000. After all, if you’re looking for people in the dark, you need a camera that can see in it.

Adobe’s new deep learning tech might make green screen keying obsolete

Mar 22, 2017 by John Aldred Add Comment

An Adobe Research paper titled Deep Image Matting, might just put an end to green and blue screen techniques. Adobe collaborated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, to develop a new system based on deep convolution neural networks. This system extracts foreground content from its background accurately and intelligently without any kind of blue or green screen background.

Eliminating the green screen isn’t a completely new idea. Lyryo’s cinema cameras are able to do this based on depth perception. But this solution is 100% software based. The paper outlines the process to evaluate images. It then determines what needs to be cut from the background, and how.

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

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