Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

What if wearable cams could have selective memory?

team gives cameras selective memory 23945311  one 3d model of a human head with pair smart glasses render
lucadpt
Wearable cameras capture a video diary of your day — but what if we had a way to tell them to only record the important stuff? What if wearable cameras could automatically stop recording when you go to the bathroom? And what if they had enough battery life to record all day?

A research team from Rice University is working on technology that could make all that a reality. The project aims to essentially give cameras “selective memory” by allowing them to not only constantly watch their surroundings (without a significant drain on battery life), but also to record only certain things. That means wearable cameras could be programmed to record only the highlights of the day, like conversations and people, not the twenty minutes you spent in the shower.

Small cameras, like the ones inside smartphones, and wearable cameras actually don’t have anything physically preventing them from seeing everything. Unlike a traditional camera, there’s no room for a physical shutter that opens to take a picture and closes to stop recording. Instead, these types of cameras use an electronic shutter. Essentially, the lens is open all the time, but when you hit the record button, a burst of electricity signals the sensor to start recording or to take a still picture. Without that electric signal, there’s no recording.

The problem is that electronic shutters cause major battery drain — and of course, there’s the issue of things that we really don’t want to record. The research team from Rice last year was able to limit the camera’s power consumption by a factor of ten simply through software improvements. But with camera sensors needing to be about 100 times more efficient for the team’s ideas to take root, there’s quite a bit of work left.

The team’s latest strategy for improving that power consumption is to limit the conversion. Videos are automatically converted from analog to digital to achieve a higher quality. If the camera could analyze the footage first and only convert the important footage and delete the rest, however, the camera’s battery life could be improved by another factor of ten.

“So, if there are times, places, or specific objects the user doesn’t want to record — and doesn’t want the system to remember — we should design mechanisms to ensure that photos of these things are never created in the first place,” said Robert LiKamWa, a Rice University graduate student.

That’s how the team developed the RedEye system, which recognizes things like faces, animals, and other objects, even in the lower-quality analog format. Using the recognition software, the system then determines what footage to convert and which clips to discard on a camera receiving continuous input.

Along with helping to improve a wearable camera’s battery life, the technology also has implications for protecting privacy, for example by teaching wearable cameras not to record inside a bathroom. While the Rice University team has enhanced wearable-cam battery life by a factor of ten on two separate occasions, the technology needs an additional improvement, by a factor of one hundred, to make a 24/7 wearable lifestyle camera possible.

Still, the potential for not having to sift through hours of boring footage — along with the possibility of having software designed to stop the camera’s recording in certain situations — could very well change the way we use wearable cameras in the future.

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Fujifilm’s successor to the wildly popular X100V has just landed
fujifilm unveils x100v successor x100vi

FUJIFILM X100VI Promotional Video/ FUJIFILM

Fujifilm has finally unveiled the successor to its super-popular X100V camera.

Read more
How to download Instagram photos for free
Instagram app running on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Instagram is amazing, and many of us use it as a record of our lives — uploading the best bits of our trips, adventures, and notable moments. But sometimes you can lose the original files of those moments, leaving the Instagram copy as the only available one . While you may be happy to leave it up there, it's a lot more convenient to have another version of it downloaded onto your phone or computer. While downloading directly from Instagram can be tricky, there are ways around it. Here are a few easy ways to download Instagram photos.

Read more
Astronaut captures stunning images of a snowy Grand Canyon
A snow-covered Grand Canyon seen from space.

In the final days of his six-month stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen took some time out of his science work to snap some striking photos of a snow-covered Grand Canyon.

The images were captured from the station in recent days as it orbited Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles.

Read more