Watermarking pics with a photog's eyeball

The patent peepers at Photography Bay have uncovered another intriguing notion with wide-ranging implications for the world of digital photography. They have eyeballed a patent filing by Canon for using a photographer's iris to watermark his or her images. According to the patent application, the proposed imaging apparatus "makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer for the purpose of personal authentication and writing this photographer information to the image of a subject without affecting processing, and in a manner transparent to operation, at the time of photography."

Rather than acquire the necessary biological information each time a shot is taken, the application explains, the Canon system provides a means for registering that information once, storing it aboard the camera and embedding it in each image shot with the camera. The iris data is batch written to collections of images, according to Photography Bay. "The purpose of the collective tagging...is to refrain from hampering the camera’s speed (frames per second) while shooting," it elucidates.

As concern about unauthorized use of digital images grows, we can expect more schemes like Canon's to protect a photographer's intellectual property from pic nickers.