Patent ID: 7606417

Claim:
A handheld digital image acquisition system having no photographic film, comprising: (a) an apparatus for capturing digital images, (b) a flash unit for providing illumination during image capture, (c) a processor. and (d) a memory having computer-readable code embedded therein for programming the processor to perform a digital segmentation method that comprises: determining one or more regions that are indicative of a foreground region, or of a background region, or of a background region and a foreground region, within at least one portion of a captured image, (e) wherein said determining comprises comparing said captured image and a reference image of nominally the same scene captured in a temporal range between just before and just after exposure of the captured image, (f) wherein the comparing comprises spatially aligning one or more regions of the captured and reference images at least in respect of pixels corresponding to the at least one portion of said captured image, and (g) wherein one of said captured and reference images being taken with flash and the other being taken without flash.