Camera produces words instead of pictures - NEWS.com.au

The Descriptive Camera produces what you have snapped in words. Picture: Courtesy of Matt Richardson

THEY say a picture tells a thousand words, but this camera will give you just a sentence.

A student in the US has invented a camera that produces a written description of what you photograph instead of the image.

Matt Richardson from New York University said he created the Descriptive Camera to capture more useful information about photographs.

Once a picture has been snapped, the image is uploaded to users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service - who describe the photo and sent it back to the camera within minutes.

Mechanical Turk is a service in which people perform menial tasks in exchange for small sums of money.

Mr Richardson said he paid $1.20 for each picture to be described.

"Modern digital cameras capture metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo," Mr Richardson said on his website.

"The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content."

Mr Richardson has used examples of the camera delivering descriptions such as: "This is a faded picture of a dilapidated building".

As well as using Mechanical Turk, the Descriptive Camera has also been fitted with a setting that will send the picture to friends online to be described for free.

Mr Richardson told the BBC that he hoped developers would offer their innovations to his camera and give it more useful applications.

"I was picturing a time in which cameras could possibly capture more useful information that can then be searched, cross-referenced and sorted," he told the BBC.