A couple of weeks ago, a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale of Kodak’s patent portfolio to a group of companies that joined together to buy them at a discounted price. The group included Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. There were more than 1,000 patents involved, related to photography, storing photos, and sharing photos.

It makes sense for Google to have been interested in those patents, considering their involvement in smartphones with cameras, and their work on Google Glass, where taking pictures and recording video will likely be one of its strengths.

I was very much surprised tonight to run across another acquisition of patents by Google from a company that I’ve seen a lot of in the past when searching for search-related patents. The company has been regularly featured as one of the “US Patent Top 50” since 2006 and is one of the most innovative companies in the world. According to the USPTO assignment database, they have close to 6,000 published pending and granted patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Google acquired 269 granted patents and one pending patent application. The image above is from the pending patent application, “Modular Camera and Printer.”

The assignment of these patent filings took place on August 31, 2012, and they were officially recorded with the USPTO on January 21, and January 22 of 2013. I didn’t see them in the USTPO assignment database until this evening.

The focus of most of these patents appears to be on printers and digital cameras and different photographic effects. Silverbrook Research and founder Kia Silverbrook have been extremely prolific in a number of different fields. Over the past few years, I’ve seen the Silverbrook name spring up fairly frequently while exploring search-related patents.

There is one patent describing facial recognition, and another patent that detects where eyes within photos are looking, so that focus can be shifted to what is being looked at. Here’s the title and abstract from that patent:

Utilising eye detection methods for image processing in a digital image camera

Abstract

A method of processing an image taken with a digital camera including an eye position sensing means said method comprising the step of utilizing the eye position information within the sensed image to process the image in a spatially varying sense, depending upon said location information. The utilizing step can comprise utilizing the eye position information to locate an area of interest within said sensed image. The processing can include the placement of speech bubbles within said image.

This patent acquisition seems to indicate that Google still believes that people like to print out pictures that they take, but they aren’t always ordinary photos as we know them. For instance, there are a few patents that provide ways for both images and audio to be printed out at the same time.

A number of the Silverbrook patents involve variations of taking pictures on a “mobile communications device” that is tied in some way to a printer. Other photographic effects are described as well that could alter the look of an image.

Some of the patents also involve taking pictures of clothing and using a “garment” printer to print them out.

I’ve listed and linked to them below to make it easier for you to click through any that you think might be interesting. I’ve read the abstracts and titles for all of them but didn’t have time to read through the patents themselves.

Patent Application (1)

Granted Patents (269)