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Update: iPhone Camera app did not replace person's head with a leaf
- xattt 5y agoWho are these people who cook up manufactured controversy for the sake of Twitter attention? The actual explanation will get lost in the discourse and leaf-head will live on in the minds of the impulse-minded masses. See also: Yanni/Laurel and the dress thing.
- tailspin2019 5y ago> leaf-head Well now you’ve just gone and given this thing a catchy name. That’s not exactly going to help matters. #leafhead
- liamkinne 5y agoQuestion for the audience: would you say this is an example of Occam’s razor?
- routerl 5y agoYes, and therefore bad troubleshooting. Don't blame systems for bad input; garbage in, garbage out.
- draw_down 5y ago
- ben_w 5y agoI wouldn’t. We do know, indeed boast, that AI is used to boost the apparent performance of consumer grade cameras and especially iPhones. There is that example of a photocopier changing numbers in the images it copies. Illusions are reasonably likely to be either in the human or the machine vision systems.
- tshaddox 5y agoI think a better question is how many people would independently develop the accusation if they were presented with the original photo without comment?
- ctdonath 5y agoYes. In an area with lots of leaves, not unreasonable to think motion or parallax unexpectedly included a leaf - vs some wild convergence of leading edge technological bugs perfectly rendering content in a system which shouldn’t.
- Natsu 5y agoThat said, it's hard for people to know any more after things like the "I am not a cat" video.
- OzzyB 5y agoYes indeed. IMO this is also a good example of engineers looking for complex bugs and solutions which are simply not there.
- henvic 5y agoDefinitely. I'm into photography, although I'm not by any means an expert, and when I first saw this news I just ignored it thinking there were so much going on, and the cause might be anything simple, it didn't really spark my curiosity. I thought maybe it was just some processing glitch, maybe it was computational photography messing up, maybe it was just a question of focus, or maybe a mix of things.
- adamrezich 5y agokind of incredible how since we were primed to see it as a camera/software glitch, that's how it looked, but, now that you mention it...
- geocrasher 5y agoOut of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the original accusation, only a few will see the follow-up. It will forever be known that iPhones replace people's heads with leaves. This is how urban legends are born. This is one of the few times I'll ever feel sorry for Apple! I can only imagine the calls they're going to get from Karen's who didn't take good pictures to begin with and blame Apple for it because they saw an internet that one time that somebody's iPhone replaced a head with some leaves.
- infotropy 5y agoThat or leaf people (similar to lizard people) can only be detected using iPhones.
- judge2020 5y agoWouldn't need to obscure leaf people if we turned everyone into leaf people.
- jpxw 5y agoI find that people on here are _extremely_ uncharitable when it comes to anything Apple
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- tshaddox 5y agoEh, I mean you’re right that more people will hear the accusation than the retraction, but I think everyone already knows and will continue to know that iPhones have excellent cameras. I wouldn’t be worried about the reputation of iPhone cameras.
- dagmx 5y agoIt's less about the reputation of the cameras but there was an unhealthy level of conspiracy in the original thread with regards to trust of digital images in general. That post was already being widely used to justify the fairly ludite views on image upscaling by the judge in the Rittenhouse trial for example.
- californical 5y agoOriginal discussion for the photo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
- draw_down 5y ago
- sombremesa 5y agoI'm amazed that such stupid stuff takes up attention, and more importantly, takes up my attention. Thankfully it's just a minute or two, but clearly I need to be more careful about what I click on (and let into my head...I'm sure this type of thing degrades bayesian priors for everyone reading it).
- thinkingemote 5y agoBasically HN is mostly an entertainment site. Like the regular News, one of its primary things is to grab our attention.
- krisoft 5y ago> I'm sure this type of thing degrades bayesian priors for everyone reading it What kind of thing do you mean by "this type of thing"? Why do you think it degrades bayesian priors? Life is, among other things, a constant quest to better understand the world around us. For every "real discovery" there is a ton of noise. Most of that noise can be easily discarded, some look more convincing. This particular instance looked more convincing. We know that modern imaging equipment is very complex. You shoot a picture and complicated processes happen which were optimised by thousands of engineers to produce a good looking photo. In the past we have seen that such complex pipelines can introduce plausible looking artefacts in a different context: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres... This is why it could be possible that maybe something similar happens with the camera app. People investigated, and it turned out that that is not the case. For every breakthrough in our understanding there were thousands of perhaps and maybes. For every eureka moment, there is a bin full of superluminal neutrino experiments. This is normal and part of the process of reasoning about the world. If your thinking processes get damaged by encountering as of yet unexplained phenomenon then your brain is broken and you should ask for a refund.
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- daenz 5y agoI think we bought into it because it looks plausible. In the original image[0], the boundary between the leaf and the person's face looks legitimately blended in a way that only AI auto-filling does. From that, it's not a leap to extrapolate that the leaf itself was auto-filled from the surroundings. 0. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FH0N9HNWQAE0n9R?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FH0N9HNWQAE0n9R?format=jpg&name=...
- stefan_ 5y agoYeah, it has that very distinct blurry mess look that you get with all the AI stuff that is always conveniently skipped over. And frankly looking at the original picture again, focus is no excuse for that. Yes, there is a leaf, no, the AI whizbang still blurred it all to crap.
- snazz 5y agoThe blurriness and "oil painting effect" likely has more to do with aggressive noise reduction and the fact that small lenses usually aren't super sharp to begin with.
- zepto 5y ago> the AI whizbang still blurred it all to crap. Maybe… Or maybe the wind was just causing the leaves to move, resulting in some blurring.
- avianlyric 5y agoOriginal image was using digital zoom, so working at the limit (or beyond) what the sensor could provide. Image processing is just doing the best it can with very little input. https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476399735858683906?s=21 https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476399735858683906?s=...
- post-it 5y agoThe AI whizzbang salvaged a photo that would have otherwise been impossible to take with a lens that small.
- 5y ago
- kaycebasques 5y agoNever underestimate the power of starting your root cause analysis with the assumption that it's pilot error! At least, when doing my own root cause analysis, it has saved me a lot of embarrassment to assume that I did something stupid and to rigorously rule out all possibilities before I blame someone else.
- ghaff 5y agoOr really starting your root cause analysis without being open enough to a wide enough set of possibilities. As a fairly trivial example, years ago now I wrote a little article observing that a Sony ad boasting about how responsive their camera was (at a time when many digital cameras had a distinct delay) was using a rather famous wildlife photo shot on film. I also noticed that it wasn't quite the famous frame though it was still an excellent photo. Odd. Maybe something about rights. You probably see where this is going. Subsequently I saw other ads in the series which had clearly mistimed versions of other famous photos. At which point the thing I had never considered clicked--to my somewhat embarrassment. (In my defense, the wildlife photo used was certainly not an obvious example of bad timing unless you were familiar with the original and even then it was subtle.)
- ctdonath 5y agoSometimes a leaf is just a leaf.
- jhgb 5y agoThis makes some of the "informed opinions" in the recent discussion hilarious to read in retrospect, considering that the event reasoned about in those comments didn't actually happen to begin with.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kranar 5y agoHappens all the time, what's fascinating is that in the original discussion there are people who came to the conclusion that it's just a leaf that is in front of her face, either one that is in the process of falling down or one that was pushed right in place by the wind... The people who made such comments were never replied to, and while I can't see upvotes my suspicion given how far down you have to scroll to read them is that no one cared to give those possibilities much credibility.
- lil_dispaches 5y agoTWTR's image and video compression is so bad I'd call it a market signal; they can't afford images???
- dagmx 5y agoisn't it more likely that they're optimizing for their users? The goal is to have a product where people are scrolling past a multitude of media content quickly. Having very small versions of that media immediately display is the UX their users benefit from.
- upbeat_general 5y agoDefinitely this. I still wish they’d have a “show original” button or even detect when you’re staying on an image/zooming in and download the full res then.
- Gupie 5y agoThe leaf turns out to be real but hasn't the guy's head behind it been removed? Unless the guy has such a small head its completely hidden!
- mdoms 5y agoWell it was a woman and her head was not completely obscured and is clearly visible. Have you even seen the original image?
- Gupie 5y agoYes, it looked like a woman to me but I was going by the title of the thread "man's head". Anyways, the image I was commenting is the one clicking on the thread title takes you to. The head is definitely missing: https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026 https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026 What image do you see the head as being "clearly visible"?
- dTal 5y agoYeah I don't understand everyone going "oh, that explains it". That is not a photo of a leaf in front of a face. A foreground leaf is involved, but it's not large enough to obscure a face. There's also a leaf-textured halo of brown which looks like it was once someone's hair.
- brandon272 5y ago
- Semiapies 5y agoI mean, I've seen dumber reactions to a leaf. I've seen dozens of cryptid enthusiasts argue about the nature of the bright orange Sasquatch that was living in the woods near a nature camera because of the blurred image of a falling leaf. This is pretty dumb, though.
- matznerd 5y agoI'm glad we got to the bottom of this. More importantly, good to know there is not someone running around with a leaf for a head...I can sleep again.
- layer8 5y agoOr maybe the leaf-head people forced him to post the "explanation" and the really AI-produced video.
- nvr219 5y agoWhat a rollercoaster.
- ChildOfChaos 5y agoAre you guys bored or something?
- bluishgreen 5y agoIt wasn't the AI that did the Auto-filling this past day, it a large mass of humanity that auto-filled an incident report into a plausible outline of a story. I think this will happen more and more once AI reaches a point of higher cognition.
- literallyaduck 5y agoYou mean people haven't been holding the leaning tower of Pisa all this time. I am shocked! I've seen some strange things from stitching photos for panoramic, it isn't a huge leap of logic to think some compression or interpolation algorithm went wrong. Glad to know it was a problem of perspective.
- jstanley 5y agoThis isn't the whole story. Just look at the picture: https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968/ph... Imagine what a person's head would look like in relation to the size of the body. Where has the head gone? What's the nebulous dark stuff textured like leaves where the person's hair should be? I am happy that the iPhone didn't invent the leaf, but it has pretty obviously done something weird with it.
- zenexer 5y agoI disagree with the conclusion. It looks like two images—one with the face obscured, one with the face visible—were combined. Notice that both the leaf and the person are sharply in focus, and there’s a distinct circular, blurry outline around the face where a transition occurs between the two images. No, the leaf in the photo isn’t fabricated by iOS. No, iOS didn’t copy a leaf from elsewhere in the image to continue the pattern. But the conclusion, “iPhone Camera app did not replace person’s head with a leaf” is probably incorrect: it looks to me like it did, in fact, replace the person’s head with a leaf. It just so happens that the leaf was really there from the perspective of one lens or photo. Wasn’t this documented as intended behavior on newer iPhones? Images from different lenses will be combined and faces replaced with clearer versions in some scenarios. In this particular instance, the “clearer” version was a leaf, as there was a leaf in the way. This isn’t really bad thing; it’s an understandable bug in a piece of technology that usually works amazingly well. However, it does mean there’s room for improvement.
- karlshea 5y ago> No, the leaf in the photo isn’t fabricated by iOS. No, iOS didn’t copy a leaf from elsewhere in the image to continue the pattern. Those two things are exactly what everyone was assuming happened. So while you're right about what is going on with the camera behavior, I think you're disagreeing about a completely separate conclusion than everyone else arrived at. > It just so happens that the leaf was really there from the perspective of one lens or photo. In the original thread the photographer was fairly certain there weren't leaves in front, which is what started all of this.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago>> No, the leaf in the photo isn’t fabricated by iOS. No, iOS didn’t copy a leaf from elsewhere in the image to continue the pattern. > Those two things are exactly what everyone was assuming happened. What? Look at the other discussion thread: > 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.. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29742539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29742539 ) There was nobody arguing that the phone hallucinated the leaf. The problem is that the phone removed the person's head so that it wouldn't pull focus from the leaf.
- mysterypie 5y agoCould someone give an ELI5 please? As I understand it, the explanation is that there was a leaf close to him that obscured the face. But what's he saying about parallax? Isn't the preview image that he would have seen on the camera display coming from the same lens that captures the image?
- NathanielK 5y agoThe parallax in the video is just a tool since photographs don't have any real depth perception like our eyes do. The small leaves on the foreground and the big leaves in the background enhance the illusion, since they're about the same size in screenspace. Maybe the preview showed a leaf, but it's close enough to skintone I doubt it stuck out to his brain on the little phone display. In meatspace, his eyes are at a different vantage point focusing on the face, while cellphone cameras try to keep everything visible as sharp as possible.
- aaron695 5y ago
- jonas21 5y agoI feel like it would have saved everyone a lot of time if he had included the full photo in the original tweet. You can see it here in this thread by @sdw [1], and it's much more apparent that there's a tree in front with leaves hanging off it. [1] https://twitter.com/sdw/status/1476957856347746305 https://twitter.com/sdw/status/1476957856347746305
- martyvis 5y agoThis one came up in Facebook. I think it is an iPhone pseudo 3D photo. It looks like the magpie beak had been merged with the fence. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1516554791932973/permalink/3026998260888611/?sfnsn=mo&ref=share https://www.facebook.com/groups/1516554791932973/permalink/3...