Intellihance® client side and server side architectures for photo site image enhancement

Consumer Digital Photography (CDP) has many advantages over film photography, including instant preview, on-demand-printing, image enhancement and Internet distribution. Despite its many advantages, CDP will not be broadly accepted until it meets and exceeds the defacto standards for quality, low cost and ease-of-use of the film based camera and its supporting infrastructure. With the advent of low-cost high-resolution image sensors, only ease-of-use will remain as a barrier to consumer acceptance of digital photography. Image enhancement is an easily understood CDP capability that allows the user to reclaim photos that might have otherwise been discarded due to composition problems or poor lighting conditions. While the consumer might recognize the 'saving power' of image enhancement, it must be 'point and shoot' simple. Intellihance supports a 'point and shoot' approach to image enhancement, making good images better and rescuing images that may have otherwise been discarded. Intellihance, a proven technology in image editing applications, can also be used in photo Kiosks, digital cameras and photo web sites. This paper will specifically examine the Intellihance user interfaces and browser-based Intellihance solutions.