[HN Gopher] iPhone camera app replaces person's head with a leaf...
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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
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(page generated 2021-12-30 23:00 UTC)