[HN Gopher] iPhone camera app replaces person's head with a leaf... ___________________________________________________________________ iPhone camera app replaces person's head with a leaf in photo Author : davidbarker Score : 100 points Date : 2021-12-30 18:00 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | matsemann wrote: | I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it | most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a | big selling point on a phone. | | But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter | applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have | vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really | did. | akomtu wrote: | Big tech has this uni-modal aporoach to users: they find what | maximizes a metric, and works for 75% of the users, but roll it | out to 100%. Dealing with the remaining 25% would have low ROI. | hetspookjee wrote: | I never understood this one size fits all approach of a lot | of companies. Controlled opposition would often result in | higher market penetration and more net happiness | annexrichmond wrote: | Yeah I find that the front facing camera on the iPhone is | notoriously bad. The pictures it takes don't look like me | because it alters the skin tone and does aggressive smoothing. | I hate it. | naz wrote: | This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? | Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and | sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats | headphones. | Philip-J-Fry wrote: | Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep | selling new versions of their product. | mrtksn wrote: | It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments | who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but | seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the | scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy | used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people | are not after accuracy. | | IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the | thing we are used to. Wouldn't have caused a confusion if they | used some other word instead of photograph. | mynameisash wrote: | Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month | ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There | must have been some filter on by default because our faces | looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no | smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked | immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- | it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. | | I similarly have mixed feelings about what I've seen lately of | the deep learning that 'restores' very old images to incredible | quality. But that quality is fake. I'm sure there's a tug at | the heartstrings to see a crisp image of your deceased father | from his high school days, but to me that seems a bit | revisionist. I don't know. I guess I'm just uneasy with the | idea of us editing our lives so readily. | layer8 wrote: | I wouldn't completely exclude the possibility that a random bit | flip caused the ML processing to go haywire. | 1_player wrote: | The probability of a bit flip enabling the leaf-replacer logic | instead of causing a weird heisenbug and just crashing the | camera app is astronomically low. | vorpalhex wrote: | Is it possible to opt in to this feature? I would love it if any | unauthorized photos of me had me replaced with background | scenery. | NavinF wrote: | Sounds like you need to watch the White Christmas episode of | Black Mirror. | dt2m wrote: | I've noticed some sort of image post-processing on the newer | iPhones that removes noise and graininess, and instead adds this | fake smoothness to all pictures. Haven't found a way to disable | it, save for shooting in RAW, which is impractical due to file | size. | | Really disappointed that this seems to be a forced setting. | jcun4128 wrote: | I have a cheaper phone that has this, makes your face look | weird, it's too smooth | | LG Stylo 6 has "AI cam" | berkut wrote: | I've had this (very agressive de-noising I think it is - it's | at least almost identical) since I got my iPhone 6S in 2015: | basically if you look at 1:1 (i.e. on a computer, as opposed to | the small screen of the phone), it almost looks like a | watercolour painting, due to how agressive it is. | | You can pretty much see it in almost all iPhone camera review | sample images (and that of phones from other manufacturers). | | Even in photos taken in direct bright sunlight! | | I imagine it has an added side 'benefit' (due to the lack of | noise/grain) of decreasing the images' sizes after compression. | [deleted] | rubatuga wrote: | I sometimes use the NightCap app for photos, and it doesn't | have that AI bullshit. | warning26 wrote: | Maybe the person really _is_ leaves, and we 're all just blind to | the truth | ineedasername wrote: | Just like the fnords. | Lamad123 wrote: | agree | fxtentacle wrote: | That looks to me like they are using deep learning with CNN for | denoising. NVIDIA OptiX can produce similar artifacts. | | However, it appears they forgot to add a loss term to penalize if | the source and the denoised result image turn out too different. | NVIDIA's denoiser has user-configurable parameters for this | trade-off. | ladberg wrote: | I think it would be impossible to train the model in the first | place without that loss term. | hughrr wrote: | Well it's in telephoto and 1/121 exposure so the photographer was | probably wobbling around like mad when it was taken and the | overlay and computational image stuff got confused. | | I'm fine with this. I use a mini tripod with my 13 pro on | telephoto. Back in the old days this would just look like ass | instead. | ineedasername wrote: | Maybe iPhones are now making aesthetic decisions? *"No, that | person's face... Well, let's just cover it with a leaf." | | It puts the censorship of Renaissance paintings & statues with | figleafs over the naughty bits in a new perspective. | implying wrote: | This reminds me of Huawei camera app detecting pictures of the | moon and superimposing a clear stock photo into your picture: | https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co... | Cerium wrote: | "Cameras" making changes to the image like this make the | discussion about the image processing pipeline during the | Rittenhouse trial seem a little less bizarre. | tandymodel100 wrote: | No, not really | kahrl wrote: | Yes, yes really. When real resolution is being substituted | with the best guess of a completely closed source image | processor, the court should be made aware of it. | tandymodel100 wrote: | This sounds like a weird rationalization for an absurd case | of technical ignorance. Like when people defended nuking | hurricanes or using UV lights as a Covid therapy. | alkonaut wrote: | Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the | past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out | unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take | some joy in this "no free lunch" demonstration. | | If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face | detection then it's probably _not_ something you can (or would | want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a tiny sensor in | something other than great light (even a heavy overcast is often | not enough) will require a _lot_ of software processing. I'm not | sure exactly what happened here but I'm pretty sure everyone | asking for "unmodified raw photos" to be produced don't | understand what they are asking for. Those "unmodified" photos | would be unusable in most cases outside very bright conditions. | vardump wrote: | I wonder if this has any implications over iPhone (or cellphones | in general) photos in court. | | This might be brought up to overturn any photo evidence from | phones. | hulitu wrote: | londons_explore wrote: | The cause of this is image-stacking. | | The phone takes ~20 frames, over 0.2 seconds. In that time, lots | of people and things in the frame move. | | Optical flow is used to track all moving parts of the image, and | then 'undo' any movement, aligning all parts of the image. | | Then the frames are combined, usually by, for each pixel, taking | something like the median or throwing out outliers and using the | average. | | When the optical flow fails to track an object in more than half | the frames, the 'outliers' that are thrown out can in fact be the | image content you wanted. | | It happens with leaves a lot because they can flutter fast from | one frame to the next, so tracking each individual leaf is hard. | A few bad tracking results on more than half the frames, and all | you end up seeing is leaves where there should be a face.. | marcodiego wrote: | What this means: Apple has been using ML to increase apparent | resolution of its camera. | | There should be a law to force vendor to disclose real camera | resolution. | pryce wrote: | how do we exclude the possibility that we are just seeing a leaf | on its way falling (or blowing) between the subject that the | photographer? | | Logically an event like that would be followed by the iphone not | detecting a face, and therefore not applying its usual face- | related black-box features? | | Supposing this is the case and is 'bad', what exactly do we | expect 'better behaviour' would mean in this situation? | micheljansen wrote: | This gives me the same feeling as those ML-powered "enhanced | zoom" features: where does the photograph end and the machine | made-up fantasy start? | gsliepen wrote: | Obligatory Red Dwarf reference: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-30 23:00 UTC)