Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Apple has acquired Spectral Edge, a UK-based startup whose technology could be used to improve photos taken on iPhones, according to filings made public on Thursday and reported by Bloomberg.
Spectral Edge was spun out from research done the University of East Anglia, and it has developed computational photography tech that could blend data from a standard lens and an infrared lens to enhance photo quality.
You can see the tech at work below — here’s what looks to be a photo taken with a standard camera compared to one improved by Spectral Edge’s technology (from this 2016 TechCrunch article). You can see that the colors are much richer in the second photo:
With the continued mobile phone arms…