Is Apple the new Kodak? You might think so when you consider that the company has published a total of 10 camera-related patents. According to a ZDNet blog, the company is seeking to build upon the success of the 5 megapixel camera and High Dynamic Range (HDR (News - Alert)) feature that was rolled out with the iPhone 4.

This news truly highlights the importance the camera plays in the smartphone form-factor and as long as Apple (News - Alert) continues to push the importance of video conferencing for the consumer and the corporate sector, it may continue to grow.

The first patent published focuses (no pun intended) on how to eliminate taking blurry photos with the iPhone’s (News - Alert) camera. Apple offers a solution that captures several images in a sequence and then compares detected movement data and selects the image associated with suitably low movement data – pretty cool.

Another of its patents relates to how the iPhone handles vignetting effects by using a “skin-tone-mask” to avoid over exposed photos. Apple offers a solution that it an efficient skin tone aware color boosting algorithm that automatically detects the skin tone and non-skin tone regions of an image and adjusts the color boost in the two regions accordingly to create photos that are more visually appealing.

The remaining patents applications refer to topics such as Automatic Tone Mapping, Radially-Based Chroma Noise Reduction, Chroma Noise Reductions, Video Processing for Masking Coding Artifacts using Dynamic Noise Maps, Continuous Image, Orientation Detectors, Automatic Exposure Mechanisms, Image Acquisition and Transcoding System, and Image Acquisition and Encoding System.

Apple is also focusing on leveraging camera capabilities in the next iPad. TMCnet reported that the company is set to introduce the Apple iPad 2 with both front- and rear-facing cameras. The company has yet to confirm this and we are basically focusing on rumors right now, but the latest patents filed by the company suggest cameras are a top priority.

In other Apple news, the company is set to enter the courtroom again as TMCnet reports that the company has been accused of false advertising. The latest filed by an iPhone customer, claiming Apple purposely crippled the iPhone 3G with the introduction of the iOS 4 to boost the sales of the iPhone 4 device.