Using Gestures To Take Self-Portraits

The act of taking self-portraits in an art unto itself, some people have the gift to manage to get an entire group of 10 people into a photo while taking a self-portrait while others not so lucky end up with photographs that cut people out or are angled badly. Timers can sometimes help although it does make one look rather silly holding a pose for 5 seconds until the camera takes the shot. Thanks to front facing cameras in certains phones and tiltable LCD screens on some cameras, taking self-portraits has started to get a bit easier.

If that wasn’t easy enough, the researchers Shaowei Chu and Jiro Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba’s Department of Computer Science in Japan are working on a new technology that incorporates the use of hand gestures to take a photo by hooking the device on to cameras and uses a computer vision algorithm to recognize hand gestures and take the photos. As it stands the device is too large to be attached to regular cameras but the researchers have said that it is starting to look promising. Hopefully, instead of an external device, they will soon find a way to incorporate the technology and algorithm into the camera itself.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Concepts, Photo-Video
Tags: Camera, gestures, Japan, photography