Recent achievements of GPS receiver manufacturers such as Air Semiconductors, SiRF, Qualcomm, u-blox, Glonav, and Geotate (NXP Software’s spin-off) are finally paving the way for intelligent integration of GPS in digital cameras.

These manufacturers have been looking at ways to integrate GPS technology with digital photography, market research firm IMS Research reported in February. However, the manufacturers face the same issue: the digital camera’s quick-start requirements can conflict directly with GPS receiver technology, which requires tens of seconds or even minutes to achieve a location fix.

“Until now, embedding GPS in portable devices has incurred lag times of 30 seconds to a minute, resulting in a clunky customer experience,” said Hans Streng, CEO of Geotate. “Nobody is going to say ‘Hey, hold that pose for a minute while I fire up the GPS’.”

Geotate’s software-based approach captures raw GPS satellite signals in the
available memory using patented technology to later be unlocked via
web-based services.

Despite this challenge, the volumes involved —  more than 100 million units shipped in 2006 — continue to spur major GPS integrated circuit companies to explore the digital camera market, according to the IMS Research report “The Worldwide Market for GPS/GNSS-enabled Portable Devices.” Another impetus is the interest digital camera manufacturers are showing in GPS technology.

“Camera manufacturers are unsure of traditional solutions because they are too power hungry, too expensive, and take too long to get a location fix,” said study author Matia Grossi. “The imminent arrival of GPS-enabled camera phones has placed increased emphasis on addressing this capability. At the moment there are limited GPS-enabled solutions, mostly in the high-end SLR (single-lens reflex) market using external (and expensive) devices.”

But techniques now emerging promise to solve the time-to-first-fix issue for digital photography. Two of these techniques were displayed at PMA 08, a photography tradeshow held in Las Vegas in January.

In Geotate’s Snapspot, the receiver is only on for a fraction of a second, while the user takes a picture. Snapspot is instantaneous and user-independent, without eating up the battery. From the manufacturer’s point of view it is a small, cost-effective way of addressing the geo-tagging market, IMS Research said.

In Air Semiconductor’s Airwave-1 receiver the receiver is always on, dynamically trading accuracy with power efficiency to find the optimum balance for each application, according to IMS. The receiver consumes as little as 1 milliampere on average and is independent of the existing hardware.

With these new techniques, IMS Research forecasts that the GPS camera market will show very strong growth over the next five years, growing from a sub-million unit market in 2006, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 200 percent. “New advances in GPS and location based services, such as geotagging, are driving growth of GPS into consumer devices such as cameras and laptops,” Grossi said. “We expect to see the market take off in 2008 with well over one million GPS-enabled cameras sold and strong growth forecast for the next four years, thanks to new, disruptive technologies like geotagging coming of age.”

Furthermore, growing demand for GPS functionality in portable devices such as digital cameras is being spurred on by the phenomenon of social networking, noted Streng. Popular sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook already enable users to manually tag content. The creation of a “geoweb” is now being advanced by Geotate’s “Capture and Process” technology, says Streng, because it enables users to intuitively and instantly add a new, physical dimension to existing online communities.

As Grossi said, “Photo sites and online communities need to maintain financial growth through traffic-based business; camera manufacturers need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive market; and end users need new and innovative management functionalities for their photo libraries. GPS is potentially the answer.”