SpringHeeledJack,
Suspect said article was written in true journalistic style, trying to sound clever but written by someone with no knowledge of the subject.
"reverse layer encoding" doesn't mean much to me, but then I don't know much about Instagram and even less about FB.
A "layer" in relation to an image is a concept found in professional programs such as Photoshop. Think of it a bit like tracing paper, it enables you to layer on additional elements onto your base image, generally speaking these elements are usually graphical in format.
"reverse" in the context of technology is used in terms such as "reverse engineering", where you don't have the source code to a program, and so you take the end-product program and make an educated guess about its internal algorithms and functions based upon how it operates.
So I guess one could extrapolate that "reverse layer encoding" in the context of FB using Instagram would be that they would be encoding additional layer data onto the original image data, with the source of the layer data being based on the content of the original image.
In other words..... facial-recognition, geo-tagging.... or something along those lines.
Last edited by mixture; 16th May 2012 at 18:59.