A technology that started life in detecting faces and penguin markings in the Antarctic is being adapted to help aid operators of military radar screens.

A team of researchers led by computer science Professor Serge Belongie at the University of California, San Diego has developed an iPad app called Visipedia that will identify most North American birds, with a little help from a human user.

A researcher at the University of Twente’s MIRA Research Institute (Enschede, The Netherlands) has developed image processing software that can count the circulating tumor cells in a blood sample and identify them by type.

Researchers at Bristol University (Bristol, UK) are involved in a £500,000 project that will see them create a vision-based control system for legged robotic systems that can travel over complex terrains.

The nonprofit Center for Innovative Technology (CIT; Herndon, VA, USA) has made a $100,000 investment in VanGogh Imaging (McLean, VA, USA), a developer of 3-D rendering software.

Scientists have developed a new imaging technique that could help doctors to predict a patient’s risk of having a heart attack.

3-D flash light detection and ranging (lidar) cameras developed by Advanced Scientific Concepts (ASC; Santa Barbara, CA, USA) have been chosen for the OSIRIS-REx planetary science mission that will return a sample of a carbonaceous asteroid to Earth in 2016.

Flir Systems (Wilsonville, OR, USA) has released details showing how its infrared camera systems were selected and used by NASA Langley Research Center for its shuttle and International Space Station programs.

Intevac Photonics, a subsidiary of Intevac (Santa Clara, CA, USA), has received a $10m contract to develop a camera for the US Army’s Apache Helicopter.

Researchers at InnerOptic Technology (Hillsborough, NC, USA) have developed software that fuses pre-operative CT scans with live ultrasound imagery in real time onto a 3-D monitor.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is to spearhead the development of a standard that is designed to specify methods and metrics for measuring and testing camera-phone image quality.

Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; Los Angeles, CA, USA) have developed a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) system that works in tandem with standard cell phones.

A region of Texas that contains four of the world's largest wind farms has shown an increase in land surface temperature that researchers have connected to local meteorological effects of the turbines.

Researchers at GEVES (Beaucouzé, France) have developed a machine vision system for monitoring the germination of seeds from a dry state to young seedlings.