Your smartphone may soon be able to automatically tag photos.
An app developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina uses the various sensors on a mobile device and those of others in the vicinity to chose the tags. The software is being called TagSense, but should not be confused with the TagSense RFID app currently in the Android Market.
"In our system, when you take a picture with a phone, at the same time it senses the people and the context by gathering information from all the other phones in the area," explains Xuan Bao, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Duke.
Smartphones and other mobile devices commonly have multiple sensors including accelerometers and light sensors. Gyroscopes and barometers can even be found in some.
An accelerometer might indicate if a person is posing or in action during a photograph. A light sensor could detect cloudy or sunny skies. The mic might recognize a laugh.
Check out the attached PDF for more details.