If I Lived In Silicon Valley…

My Top 3

So I have talked to some of you previously about super-resolution techniques. Super-resolution and image deconvolution (correcting for image distortions) turnout to use a lot of the same statistical and mathematical methods that one has to learn as economics PhD.

So I came across these super-resolution techniques trying to look up something else for econometrics and became intrigued about applied applications for them. If you are the United States Air force or NASA its easy to think of a use, but what about everyone else? The application that I thought of up was using this high powered math to take decent pictures on your cellphone. If your cellphone is like mine, it has a camera in it that is less than impressive. One feature that is nice though is that it can take short videos. While a single frame from a short videos would make a poor picture, with 100 frames and some cool mathematics these frames can be combined into one good looking medium resolution image.

So here is the user experience in a nut

At first I thought that such a service would take an unreasonably large amount of work to setup. But then I found that a lot of the code that you would need is already written. First, opening a Google App Engine account would solve the problem of needing a server to run the code (at least at low volumes). Second, cellphone cameras add a lot of noise to their images. Luckily, there is an open source adaptive image deconvolution algorithm available that can process multiple frames simultaneously. After cleaning up the noise, there is open source software that takes multiple frames and stitches them together (here and here). It seems to me that the big hurdle in getting a service like this off the ground is writing the code to get these three pieces of software to work together on Google’s app engine. I am not sure how you would make money off of such a service just yet. Perhaps a cell phone maker would be willing to buy the technology and offer it as a service to purchasers of their phone.

I have a lot of writing to get done before I finish my dissertation so I can’t work on it, but I hope someone does because I think this would be a nice service to have.