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AI-designed camera only records objects of interest while being blind to others
- r-bryan 4y ago
- m-watson 4y agoThe paper: To image, or not to image: class-specific diffractive cameras with all-optical erasure of undesired objects https://elight.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43593-022-00021-3 https://elight.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43593-022-...
- IanCal 4y agoSomething really interesting here if you read the title and comments first is that this is an optical thing. It's not software running on the camera, it's physical.
- gonzo41 4y agoInteresting article. Though I don't think the cryptography angle will pan out. I wonder if it was added because crypto's been a buzz word of late, and the researchers just really wanted to build this camera.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoAlso blurs the line (hrumf) between what is hardware and what is software? I mean software designed the hardware to behave with a certain ... algorithm?
- dekhn 4y agoWhile that idea might seem somewhat out-there, it's fairly straightforward once you think about it. We know the transfer function for light through matter, and can calculate its derivative. Therefore, we can use ML to design matter shapes that have desired properties. All computers are effectively physical systems that control their noise levels to achieve logical operations. In this case, it's an analog system with no moving parts, but I imagine that given the existence of spatial light modulators and mems mirrors, you could probably reprogram the system in realtime to erase what you wanted on the fly.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoThis COULD provide privacy.
- YetAnotherNick 4y agoICs are hardware designed by software to run any software for decades.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y agoMaybe HN should make the comment button only available after first clicking the link. I see more and more of this "omg title" behavior on HN these days
- edgyquant 4y agoI’d prefer they enforced the rules and kick people who mention reading the article
- culi 4y agolike all 3 of us rn?
- edgyquant 4y agoLow effort trolling as also against the rules
- culi 4y agoNot trolling, just pointing out how you could've just flagged the comment if it was really an issue for you. Instead you ended up breaking the rule yourself just to beat your drum about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- edgyquant 4y agoExcept that I didn’t break the rule because it’s about telling people to read the article not about mentioning the article at all.
- 6510 4y agoLet ML decide!
- fudged71 4y agoThis seems to be a new PR spin on the same technology that was posted a while ago. 3D printed optical neural networks. I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest considering the energy efficiency and speed of computation.
- robryk 4y agoThe problem with them is that you don't get multiple layers of nonlinear operations: wave functions in simple media form a linear space after all.
- dekhn 4y agoI don't see any technical reason you couldn't implement a relu in optics. There is a whole area, nonlinear optics (I think you may have intended that when you you said 'simple media?' Well, let me see. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03787 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.03787 From two years ago: https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-45-17-4819&id=437560 https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-45-17-4819&id=... but again, this isn't simple media.
- robryk 4y agoThanks, the papers you quoted seem to describe something with low losses (though i can't find explicit statements to that effect when skimming). I was under the impression that nonlinear optics will have huge losses, because it requires multiphoton interactions (which should usually have low cross sections), so will have to figure out which part of my intuition doesn't hold.
- bee_rider 4y agoBecause you brought it up in the context of "I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest in..." I do assume that it is something neat with an interesting application and cool engineering behind it. However, "3D printed optical neural network" sounds like a term someone came up with by selecting randomly from a bag of PR buzzwords and trying to come up with the most incoherent phrase possible, to the point where if I saw a headline about it I'd assume it was a scam or something.
- culi 4y agobiology inspires software inspires hardware I guess with more and more stuff coming out of nano- and bio-tech we can append "inspires biology" and bring it back around
- ortusdux 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32469117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32469117
- themaninthedark 4y agoGet the digital equivalent of fnord in optical algorithms, feel free to rob/~murder~ assassinate with no evidence. Bonus points for when implants become widespread, then people won't be able to see you either!
- kzrdude 4y agoIs there an adversarial network that can take the redacted result and try to reconstruct what the camera actually saw?
- MauranKilom 4y agoThat was also my first thought. They claim that the data is "instantaneously erased", but "doesn't look like the input" is different from "erased".
- mojo74 4y agoIf this AI had designed an animal's optics it would have been the frog's: https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/eat.php https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/eat.php
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI believe my own brain works this way.
- siculars 4y ago“…erasure of undesired objects” This is not going to turn out well. Do we really want to edit reality in this way? This is like the printer that automatically watermarks your prints - for your security and protection! Coming to a child protection law near you real soon. Want to take a picture of that Ferrari? That’ll be an extra $5. No, you really can’t take photos in airports. Thats a police officer(s). (Literally) Nothing to see here, move along. Vampires/Ghosts. A class of people who’s faces are in a master redact database. You know, like some real CIA Jason Borne stuff. Military installation? What military installation? Replace with slave labor camp or, a more economically favorable rendition - “sweatshop.”
- undersuit 4y ago> Do we really want to edit reality in this way? Do you have a solution to stop this hypothetical future you've envisioned that isn't also just as bad? "Hey you can't code that feature!"
- edgyquant 4y agoNot to mention that there is nothing wrong with allowing people to see different things lmao. What even is this conversation ?
- stavros 4y agoIf you don't want a camera that can't take photos of undesired objects, don't buy one.
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoWhat when there are laws preventing the manufacturing of such desired cameras? I am all for great ideas and tools and implementations. I am just very leery of humans. ;)
- stavros 4y agoRegimes don't generally bother to mandate the use of a specific technology, they just mandate the act illegal.
- Linda703 4y ago[dead]
- fbanon 4y agoIt's an optical MNIST recognizer.
- jhallenworld 4y agoThis is how the "violet cusps" from The Eyes of the Overworld were made.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld "There, Cugel finds two bizarre villages, one occupied by wearers of the magic violet lenses, the other by peasants who work on behalf of the lens-wearers, in hopes of being promoted to their ranks. The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, and peasant women are princesses — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale."
- jamesjyu 4y agoAlso similar to Wizard of Oz where everyone has to wear green spectacles to protect their eyes, when in fact, it was to make the Emerald City seem greener and more spectacular than it actually was.
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- z2 4y ago"Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you." --Douglas Adams Maybe this tech is a continuum, but we've skipped past Adams straight to 2.0, and Overworld is 3.0.
- selfhoster11 4y agoIn the same vein, a short sci-fi film "The Nostalgist" [0]. This film really opened my eyes regarding why we may not want devices that alter our perception of reality. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzCQtoQ8ypk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzCQtoQ8ypk
- dekhn 4y agoBTW, if you enjoy Tales of the Dying Earth, I recently read Cage of Souls, which is drawn in the same vein: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DPRW17S https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DPRW17S
- thow_away_soon 4y agoThat's interesting, could it be used on medical imaging to erase noise or somehow highlight tumors or fractures, without software post processing?
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- nullc 4y ago> AI-based camera design was also used to build encryption cameras, providing an additional layer of security and privacy protection. Such an encryption camera, designed using AI-optimized diffractive layers, optically performs a selected linear transformation, Differentiable schemes do not generally make for secure cryptography.
- renewiltord 4y agoDude this is insanely cool. It's through light diffraction that it censors. You could make an ad blocker camera haha! Very cool. Though I wonder if we'll get a Eurion censor camera instead.
- freedude 4y ago"Privacy protection is a growing concern in the digital era, with machine vision techniques widely used throughout public and private settings. Existing methods address this growing problem by, e.g., encrypting camera images or obscuring/blurring the imaged information through digital algorithms. Here, we demonstrate a camera design that performs class-specific imaging of target objects with instantaneous all-optical erasure of other classes of objects. This diffractive camera consists of transmissive surfaces structured using deep learning to perform selective imaging of target classes of objects positioned at its input field-of-view. After their fabrication, the thin diffractive layers collectively perform optical mode filtering to accurately form images of the objects that belong to a target data class or group of classes, while instantaneously erasing objects of the other data classes at the output field-of-view." This only works for the privacy-minded, naive among us. If you want to exclude something from a picture or video. Do NOT record it, at all, EVER! If it can record anything it can record the wrong thing.
- freedude 4y agoWhat happens when a camera can't be used in a location that needs added "security" (which is really surveillance and not security) but it cannot be used due to expected privacy reasons (bathrooms, locker rooms, fitting rooms). The claim is "proven" that it cannot "see" your private parts because it is programmed not too. I guarantee the AI will fail at some point or is vulnerable to some attack. Or what if it is connected to a radar/laser speed enforcement camera and takes your cars photo because it detects the car behind you speeding but it cannot "take" that part of the photo because it mis-detected you as the speeder. This technology is fraught with problems when it comes to evidence in a court of law. What is not there is just as important as what is there and if you are erasing what is there you are also erasing what is not there?
- bee_rider 4y agoHmm. Maybe a shield could be designed to sit in front of a user's face or something. If it recognizes a friend, allow light which should be on a good trajectory to hit the friend's eyeballs go through. Otherwise, block everything.
- jstrieb 4y agoReminds me of this really cool video about using Fourier Optics for optical pattern recognition.[1] The video happens to have one of the best explanations of Fourier transforms I've yet encountered. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9FZ4igNxNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9FZ4igNxNA
- sudden_dystopia 4y agoWouldn’t the underlying data that the camera parsed to determine what to record still be recorded or be otherwise retrievable somewhere? Meaning everything is still recorded in some way?
- bradyd 4y agoThis system is fully optical, so the data is filtered before it reaches the camera.
- theanonymousone 4y agoReminds me of a book with a 4-digit title.
- rexreed 4y ago"AI-designed optical filter blurs out areas of an image that don't match the pre-trained network design" - seems to be a bit more on point.
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- batuhandirek 4y agoIsn't "erased" a bit misleading from the paper? I understand that the camera does not see anything but objects of interest in which it was trained and manufactured.
- bell-cot 4y agoAnd, with a bit of poisoning in the image training data, all of the security cameras at $Critical_Facility will be utterly blind to anyone who wears a North Korean Military Intelligence full-dress uniform...
- bee_rider 4y agoI thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
- angrycontrarian 4y agoI'm not sure the authors appreciate the impact of their own invention. This isn't a camera that censors things: it's a passive image segmentation model that runs in real time and consumes zero power. This would have huge implications for robotics applications.
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- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoOptical pattern recognition is an established field. Here's a simple version via Fresnel zone plates: https://youtu.be/Y9FZ4igNxNA https://youtu.be/Y9FZ4igNxNA
- angrycontrarian 4y agoThat is a very good channel, thank you!
- staindk 4y agoNo mention of Black Mirror in the comments yet - I'm surprised! A lot of the other theorising here runs right alongside the premise of one of the stories told in the White Christmas episode[1]. IIRC the episode was very well done, as most of them are. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOHy4Ca9bkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOHy4Ca9bkw
- apocalypstyx 4y agoThe real problem is that humans have always deluded themselves that some technology was a 'truth technology'. It's been done with everything from typewriters to cameras. However, the camera has always lied, always rendered a counterfactual to a hypothesized truth state, denied access to fundamental reality. That a camera may now lie in a slightly different fashion does not alter that. Are you going to believe your lying eyes?
- kadoban 4y agoThe camera tells truth better than our eyes do. It can't represent color or especially dynamic range that well, and framing has a way of bending truth, but our eyes are far worse. Everything we think we see is biased by the viewer, subject to hundreds of unconcious filters and processing steps, and colored by our also imperfect memory. And then we're also biased to ignore all of that and think our vision and memories are objective and faultless truth. The proofs of this are everywhere, but the most obvious are optical illusions, youtube videos on visual attention, studies on unreliability of witness statements, etc. Our eyes lie their fucking pants off.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoAbout 6 years ago I sat on a jury. I was told by the defense that the plaintiff, who was suing for being critically injured in a workplace scenario, was overstating his injuries. They showed evidence that saw the plaintiff washing his car. The defense pointed out that there were timestamps on those car washing videos and each took place over 4 hours because he had to rest due to the pain from his sustained injuries. Aside from the facts of the case which were clearly in favor of the plaintiff, this attempt at deception pushed the jury to award more money than it likely would have otherwise. Now that storytime is out of the way, this particular AI reminds me of a photo taken at a lynching. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/assets/imgs/14_crowd_desktop.jpg https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/assets/imgs/14_crow... If you obscure the top half of this photo from view, how does that change your perspective regarding what is going on at the time? IMO, recordings need to record what is, not what we believe we want to see.
- notahacker 4y agoOn the flip side, it was possible to make a lynching look like a harmless social gathering with the technology of the era: point the camera selectively or take a pair of scissors to the image. Loss of timestamps is easily achieved by using any recorded media without timestamps, or any third-rate video editing software. Beria was airbrushed out of reproductions of photos that had circulated for years before he fell out of favour, but the revised images look convincing enough in the absence of that context. Cameras have never given a complete picture of everything going on (and people start worrying about panopticons with proposals that fall well short of that). Anybody that wants to show only what they want to see can choose whether or not to record or edit the recording after the fact. The actual use cases for tech that can decide whether something is worth recording in real time are likely to be comparatively mundane...
- Mockapapella 4y agoEarworm by Tom Scott comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
- oldstrangers 4y agoGiven the rise of UFO / UAP sightings I always wondered why there wasn't just an army of cameras pointed at strategic regions around the globe 24/7 (that aren't government owned). A camera like this would be great for catching only what's really interesting.
- NavinF 4y agoAre UFO sightings on the rise? I thought they stayed constant while https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/
- ksr 4y agoYou're saying this as if it were a good thing.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Since the characteristic information of undesired classes of objects is all-optically erased at the camera output through light diffraction, this AI-designed camera never records their direct images. Therefore, the protection of privacy is maximized since an adversarial attack that has access to the recorded images of this camera cannot bring the information back. This feature can also reduce cameras’ data storage and transmission load since the images of undesired objects are not recorded. That seems overstated. In the third example image pair, I can easily see a shadow of the input 5 in the output. I'm pretty sure the 9 is also there in the fourth pair, but the shadow is not as clear.
- beambot 4y agoWhat guarantees do you have that information doesn't still bleed through -- e.g. that compressed sensing techniques could still recreate meaningful parts of the obscured image?
- whatshisface 4y agoThis was not designed by an "AI", it was designed through gradient descent optimization. It is an interesting application but it has nothing to do with AI.
- Lramseyer 4y agoSo this is really cool and useful, but it's important to keep in mind that since this is a diffractive structure, it probably only works with coherent light (what you get from a laser.) Most normal light sources produce incoherent light, and that tends to not work so well with complex diffractive structures.
- iamcrazyyounus 4y agoA fascinating article. I suppose we can add "inspires biology" and turn it around as more and more things emerge from nano- and bio-tech.
- mikewarot 4y agoIt's an interesting idea, but I doubt it could work well in the real world, where any angle or distance errors would likely throw it off. In a production line environment with known objects, on the other hand... it could be great.