4 ms·

Your brain does the same, how do you know there is no "artist's impression" in your mind?

ktpsns 8y ago
By definiton of reality: Several people agree on the same observation. This is also how science works (reproducibility).
- jerf 8y ago
  Your agreement of the observation contains orders of magnitude fewer bits of information than the original object, or even the original image. If you look at an image and agree that you see "a cat" and someone next to you agrees that they see "a cat", you've compressed megabytes of data down into what is somewhere around 20-30 bits, tops. (I'm being generous with the bit count. "a cat" is realistically probably low teens, tops.) This isn't a criticism of your point per se, because it is just the way things are. But it's relevant in this case, because we can see this sort of enhancement as something like taking "a cat" (the low light, low-information image), and presenting something to us that looks like an high-information image. Although it is not spanning anywhere that many bits in the process; this is a much more gentle enhancement. But it is in some sense a quantitative difference rather than a qualitative one. There's a whole lot of interpolation and compression an re-expansions of the compressed data going on all over the place in the visual space. This algorithm doesn't strike me as a significant change in that space versus what brains are already doing. But it is something to keep an eye out on, as computer vision continues to improve in its ability to plausibly fill in data. I can see a world coming where you can feed an algorithm a 2x2 24-bit color picture and it'll "enhance" it into some perfectly plausible picture. And if you change one of the pixel inputs by one, some completely different plausible picture.
  - ktpsns 8y ago
    Well, I'm a scientist, I compare numbers. This makes science objective and unbiased. Of course this is not the full story, but it is what marks the cornerstone of enlightment: Knowledge vs. faith.
    - jerf 8y ago
      Rather a lot of philosophy of science disagrees with the confidence you are labeling your statement with. If numbers automatically gave us objective and unbiased information the world would be a very different place... and I mean that with a very generous interpretation of what putting numbers on things means, not a tight, pedantic one.

By definiton of reality: Several people agree on the same observation. This is also how science works (reproducibility).

jerf 8y ago
Your agreement of the observation contains orders of magnitude fewer bits of information than the original object, or even the original image. If you look at an image and agree that you see "a cat" and someone next to you agrees that they see "a cat", you've compressed megabytes of data down into what is somewhere around 20-30 bits, tops. (I'm being generous with the bit count. "a cat" is realistically probably low teens, tops.) This isn't a criticism of your point per se, because it is just the way things are. But it's relevant in this case, because we can see this sort of enhancement as something like taking "a cat" (the low light, low-information image), and presenting something to us that looks like an high-information image. Although it is not spanning anywhere that many bits in the process; this is a much more gentle enhancement. But it is in some sense a quantitative difference rather than a qualitative one. There's a whole lot of interpolation and compression an re-expansions of the compressed data going on all over the place in the visual space. This algorithm doesn't strike me as a significant change in that space versus what brains are already doing. But it is something to keep an eye out on, as computer vision continues to improve in its ability to plausibly fill in data. I can see a world coming where you can feed an algorithm a 2x2 24-bit color picture and it'll "enhance" it into some perfectly plausible picture. And if you change one of the pixel inputs by one, some completely different plausible picture.
- ktpsns 8y ago
  Well, I'm a scientist, I compare numbers. This makes science objective and unbiased. Of course this is not the full story, but it is what marks the cornerstone of enlightment: Knowledge vs. faith.
  - jerf 8y ago
    Rather a lot of philosophy of science disagrees with the confidence you are labeling your statement with. If numbers automatically gave us objective and unbiased information the world would be a very different place... and I mean that with a very generous interpretation of what putting numbers on things means, not a tight, pedantic one.