Engineer Haike Guan works on research and development at Ricoh's Software Research Center in Beijing, China, including R&D for image processing and image security technologies. In the interview, Mr. Guan discusses his education and background with Ricoh, and goes on to cover some of the specific development work in which he's played a role. These include lens abberation correction, long-exposure noise reduction and skew correction technologies which reached the market in the company's late 2005-model Caplio R3 digital camera.

Other topics include the establishment of the Software Research Center Beijing, development of face detection technology for the Caplio R6, as well as several technologies from the Ricoh CX1 - multi-pattern auto white balance, wide dynamic range technology, and multi-target autofocus. The interview provides some interesting insights - for example, noting that while aberration and noise correction code was developed at the request of the company's digital camera division, the unusual skew correction capability which we've since seen in many of Ricoh's cameras came from a proposal offered by the R&D team themselves.

More details can be found in the Ricoh interview.