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* The chip, built by a team at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory, can perform tasks such as creating more realistic or enhanced lighting in a shot without destroying the scene's ambience, in just a fraction of a second. The technology could be integrated with any smartphone, tablet computer or digital camera.

* Software-based systems typically take several seconds to perform this (HDR) operation, while the chip can do it in a few hundred milliseconds on a 10-megapixel image. This means it is even fast enough to apply to video, Ickes says. The chip consumes dramatically less power than existing CPUs and GPUs while performing the operation, he adds.

* To remove unwanted features from the image, such as noise -- the unexpected variations in color or brightness created by digital cameras -- the system blurs any undesired pixel with its surrounding neighbors, so that it matches those around it. In conventional filtering, however, this means even those pixels at the edges of objects are also blurred, which results in a less detailed image.

* To perform each of these tasks, the chip's processing unit uses a method of organizing and storing data called a bilateral grid. The image is first divided into smaller blocks. For each block, a histogram is then created. This results in a 3-D representation of the image, with the x and y axes representing the position of the block, and the brightness histogram representing the third dimension.