Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Recently I bought a new digital camera. In addition its basic features for taking digital photos, it’s also loaded with features that make my photography experience very enjoyable and fun.

If I can wish for one more feature in my new camera, that would be geotagging. I wish my camera can automatically annotate digital photos with location information. In this blog, I discuss the design of a geotag digital camera that I’ve been thinking about.

If you have any insights on this subject, I’m happy to hear from you.

Geotag Digital Photography

In general, I think geotag digital photography is useful in several ways: enables the automatic categorization of photos based on location, enables photo sets to be viewed from a spatial perspective (i.e., displaying photos in a map mashup based on location), and helps to build advanced photo search with spatial query support.

Shortcomings of the Current GPS Cameras

I know there are existing GPS cameras that support geotagging. However, I think, and many of your would agree, that these cameras are not suitable for the main stream consumers. There is no way my wife can be convinced to use this camera during her trip to Paris, and she probably prefers something like this.

My Design Requirements

So how can we design a geotag digital camera for the main stream consumers? Before I go on with my brainstorm design specifics, let me describe few of my design requirements. A consumer-friendly geotag camera must be (1) user-friendly and (2) fashionable.

A geotag camera should be easy to use, even to those who have little knowledge about GIS and geotagging technology. Moreover, in order to compete with other non-geotag digital cameras, the design of our camera must be fashionable. When using it, the users shouldn’t feel that it’s a geeky device, but rather its an essential technology that is part of their everyday life style. Think ubiquitous computing.

Combining a Camera with a GPS Cell Phone

I thought about few different designs for our geotag camera. One of which that I like the most is the design of a digital camera that exploits the GPS navigation capability of a cell phone. Today’s GPS camera has an all-in-one design — the GPS reader and the geotag module are tightly-coupled and integrated in a single camera design. I think a more flexible design to separate these individual components. For example, rather than creating a camera that has a built-in GPS module for reading location information, develop a camera to read location information wirelessly from a GPS cellphone that the user carries.

This design has few advantages over an all-in-one solution.

1. Not having all components integrated in a single camera could mean a smaller design footprint. The camera will weight less and thus become more attractive to the consumers.
2. I suspect not all users want to use geotag features whenever they take pictures. It’s not economic for users to carry the whole GPS camera package when they don’t want to take geotag photos. My design overcomes this problem. If the user doesn’t want to take geotag photos, simply take the camera and leave the cell phone at home.
3. It’s more economic for different personal devices to utilize each other’s capability. Why should users carry a camera with an extra GPS reader when he/she already has a cell phone that can provide GPS navigation capability?

I think my design is quite reasonable given today’s state-of-art technology.

• There is an increasing number of GPS mobile products. This ranges from cell phones to PDA. It shouldn’t be too long before we see GPS navigation becoming part of a standard wireless service package.
• The computing power in digital cameras is increasing. My new camera has more memory than the old PC that is dusting my study room. It’s reasonable to assume that new generations of digital cameras will have enough memory and CPU powers to support geotag processing. Their OS will support wireless network protocols such as 801.11 and Bluetooth. With these communication technology, pairing up a cell phone and a digital camera in an ad-hoc environment shouldn’t be difficult.

Conclusions

I love my new digital camera, but I’ll love it even more if it supports automatic geotagging. While few GPS cameras exist today, but I think none of which is yet ready for the main stream consumers. A more flexible solution is to design a geotag camera that utilizes the reading of location information from a nearby GPS device (e.g., a GPS cell phone). As ad-hoc wireless network technology (Bluetooth and 802.11) matures, my idea of the geotag digital camera may just be possible in the near future.