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Tuesday, October 24, 2006

FotoNation Debuts World’s First Face Detection for Camera Phones at 6Sight™ Mobile Imaging Sum

FotoNation, (www.fotonation.com), a world-leading imaging and connectivity solutions company for the digital photography industry, announced today at the 6Sight Mobile Imaging Summit, FotoNation “Face Tracker™,” the world’s first face detection and tracking technology for camera phones. FotoNation Face Tracker represents a major breakthrough in advanced digital image capture technology. It detects the presence and position of a subject’s face at up to 30 frames per second during image capture enabling the optimal setting of exposure, focus and color balance.

At the Mobile Imaging Summit, FotoNation demonstrated simultaneous tracking of up to 8 faces on a camera phone. Previously only available in digital still cameras, FotoNation Face Tracker is a highly portable software implementation that scales in performance according to the power of the processor used in the device. FotoNation’s demonstration featured a camera phone with face detection and tracking comparable in performance to currently shipping digital cameras. The small footprint implementation is platform independent and was shown on both Symbian Series 60 3rd edition OS and Windows Mobile™ 5.0.

In addition to aiding in proper focus, exposure and color balance, the demonstration featured automatic image orientation, face cropping, and face thumbnail generation for use in the phone’s contact address book.

“This is first of many new advanced imaging technologies we will be leveraging from our work with digital still cameras into the camera phone market,” said Eran Steinberg, CEO of FotoNation.

FotoNation patent-pending Face Tracker technology is available immediately for licensing. For more information, see www.fotonation.com.