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This seems like a cool feature. Is there something comparable on flagship Android phones?

thesandlord 6y ago
Are there any flagship android phones with a monocular camera setup? Seems like every new phone, even at the $400 "mid-tier" price point, has at least two cameras. Even phones like the Pixel 3A which have a single lens use the "dual-pixel" tech to get better depth info.
haditab 6y ago
Portrait mode in Pixel2 did the same thing and imo opinion worked better than portrait mode in the dual-camera iphone 7 plus (I know iphone 7 plus is older but that's the only dual camera iphone I had access to at the time).
- renewiltord 6y ago
  No, the Pixel 2 and iPhone XR do the same thing. They use DPAF. In the post, you'll see that the XR's depth map actually smoothly follows the ground into the background. The Pixel 2 will do that too and it will work for inanimate objects as well.
renewiltord 6y ago
The portrait mode feature is present. See this for example: https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io but it uses the tech they describe from iPhone XR, i.e. the slight difference in the angle that it hits two parts of the sensor is used as an input to detect depth https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-on-pixel-3.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-...
danielbarla 6y ago
I have no references to back this up, but I did have some odd results with setting my Huawei P9's camera to "aperture mode" (this was a while back, the actual mode's name might have been different). Essentially what you'd expect is that the subject should be crisp, but anything further away or closer should blur significantly. I assumed that this was done as expected, via the lens. But certain scenes would have this "effect" applied wrong; things that should have been out of focus in the background were in focus, while simultaneously things at the same distance were blurred elsewhere, and so on. I quickly became convinced it was a software effect, and the algorithm was simply guessing the depth wrong. While it looked great most of the time, it only took a few of these oddball Escher-esque photos to put me off it for good (since you generally only notice it afterwards, when it's too late to retake). EDIT: Actually, having now gone through this article, it has some really good examples of how this can go wrong (e.g. dog with "crown" instead of background tree), and how odd it can feel.

Are there any flagship android phones with a monocular camera setup? Seems like every new phone, even at the $400 "mid-tier" price point, has at least two cameras. Even phones like the Pixel 3A which have a single lens use the "dual-pixel" tech to get better depth info.

haditab 6y ago

Portrait mode in Pixel2 did the same thing and imo opinion worked better than portrait mode in the dual-camera iphone 7 plus (I know iphone 7 plus is older but that's the only dual camera iphone I had access to at the time).

renewiltord 6y ago
No, the Pixel 2 and iPhone XR do the same thing. They use DPAF. In the post, you'll see that the XR's depth map actually smoothly follows the ground into the background. The Pixel 2 will do that too and it will work for inanimate objects as well.

renewiltord 6y ago

The portrait mode feature is present. See this for example: https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io https://imgur.com/a/xyMH4Io but it uses the tech they describe from iPhone XR, i.e. the slight difference in the angle that it hits two parts of the sensor is used as an input to detect depth https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-on-pixel-3.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/learning-to-predict-depth-...

danielbarla 6y ago

I have no references to back this up, but I did have some odd results with setting my Huawei P9's camera to "aperture mode" (this was a while back, the actual mode's name might have been different). Essentially what you'd expect is that the subject should be crisp, but anything further away or closer should blur significantly. I assumed that this was done as expected, via the lens. But certain scenes would have this "effect" applied wrong; things that should have been out of focus in the background were in focus, while simultaneously things at the same distance were blurred elsewhere, and so on. I quickly became convinced it was a software effect, and the algorithm was simply guessing the depth wrong. While it looked great most of the time, it only took a few of these oddball Escher-esque photos to put me off it for good (since you generally only notice it afterwards, when it's too late to retake). EDIT: Actually, having now gone through this article, it has some really good examples of how this can go wrong (e.g. dog with "crown" instead of background tree), and how odd it can feel.