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Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof

1024 points by petodo 4y ago

cherioo 4y ago
Samsung is learning the best from Huawei https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-controversy-978486/ https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
I guess the old "seeing is believing" can be thrown out the window nowadays.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  With photographs it was never true. This is the classical text on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
- swayvil 4y ago
  But it isn't seeing, right? I mean, seeing a digital image of a thing is totally different from seeing the actual thing. A digital image is a representation/abstraction/map kind of thing. And then a little bit of mental shorthand inside your head makes a connection and declares the thing and the representation-of-the-thing to be one and the same. But it isn't the same thing. Not by a million miles. It's a socially-accepted mindfuck is what it is.
abybaddi009 4y ago
Does DxOMark penalize such falsifications?
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Who is DxOMark?
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    It’s camera testing software.
  - abybaddi009 4y ago
    They are a organization that perform benchmarks. Here's a link: https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/ https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      It’s also the name of the software they, and others, use. Though I guess the actual software has the generic name "Analyzer": https://corp.dxomark.com/analyzer/ https://corp.dxomark.com/analyzer/
kevincox 4y ago
I'm not very convinced. It looks like they are doing some processing, maybe special to the moon but it looks more like some form of sharpening or contrast boosting than adding detail. In all of the examples it seems that there is information in the original (dark spots) that are getting boosted. It would be interesting to see this tried on a source image that isn't the moon. Just white with a few dark spots. Does it actually add in completely new craters, or just where there are existing smudges? Or do something like half of a moon photo and have white, does it add craters to the white side? The OP tried to do this by changing the contrast but I failed to see any craters appearing where there wasn't already dark spots in the source photo. It does seem strange that the OP is using an image of the moon to start and that they don't provide a still shot of the one where they modified the brightness levels to cause clipping. It doesn't really "drive the point home" as claimed. Of course the answer to these may be that you need something moon-like enough to trigger the moon optimizations. But if that is the answer it would be interesting to see something that comes right up to the threshold where it either snaps in and out of these optimizations or two very similar images produce widely different results.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > In all of the examples it seems that there is information in the original (dark spots) that are getting boosted. That was the point of the Gaussian blur. By blurring the source image of the moon before taking its picture, there was no information. The Gaussian blur destroys fine detail, by design. The image enhancement applied by the Samsung phone is adding detail where there was none originally – not just detail that might be buried in the optics somewhere, but not there at all. It involves a computational model of what the target (here the moon) "should" look like and guesses at what it thinks are the blurry bits.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    But I don't see it adding any detail over the blur. It really just looks like it is boosting contrast a bit on top of the blur. I don't see anything like ridges or defined features appearing.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
whatisthiseven 4y ago
Imagine this future: Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned servers is cheap. You take a picture on a crappy camera, and Samsung uses AI to "fix" everything. It knows what stop signs, roadways, busses, cars, stop lights, and more should look like, and so it just uses AI to replace all the textures. Samsung sells what's on the image to advertisers and more with the hallucinated data. People can't tell the difference and don't know. They "just want a good looking picture". People further use AI to alter images for virtual likes on Tiktok and Insta. This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models that all seem to think objects further away have greater detail, clarity, and cleanliness than they should. You look at a picture of a park you took, years before, and could have sworn the flowers were more pink, and not as red. You are assured, by your friend who knows it all, that people's memories are fallible; hallucinating details, colors, objects, sizes, and more. The image, your friend assures you further? "Advanced tech captured its pure form perfectly". And thus, everyone will demand more clarity, precision, details, and color where their eyes don't remember seeing.
- cjsawyer 4y ago
  This is my exact worry with things like chat gpt polluting the scrapable internet. The feedback loop might eventually ruin whatever value the models currently have by filling them with incorrect but plentiful generated nonsense.
- dusted 4y ago
  Basically this.. As "neat" as AI "improvement" is, I don't think it has any actual value, I can't come up with any use-case where I can accept it. "Make pictures look good by just hallucinating stuff" is one of the harder ones to explain, but you did it well.. Another thing, pictures for proof and documentation, maybe not when they're taken but after the fact, for historical reasons, or forensics.. We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken. (Yes, I know that photoshop is a thing, but that's a very deliberate action, which I believe it should be)
  - 4y ago
braho 4y ago
I guess there is some AI algorithm that does zoom as postprocessing. That AI knows the moon so it can fill in the blanks and compensate for a (relatively) crappy sensor. So in the future, there are either cameras that can see what others have seen before, and those that can truly capture new, true, detail (true as in, without filling it with estimations)
gus_massa 4y ago
Can it be just deconvolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution The Gaussian blur they applied is theoretically reversible in a continuous function and infinite precision. In a discrete function (like a image in the computer) and only a few dozens of bits it's not 100% reversible, but it can be partially undone and get a sharper image (that is not as sharp as the initial image).
- danuker 4y ago
  I guess one way to tell whether the image is processed locally is by disabling every connection, and seeing if the pics still look good. But there still might be advanced machine learning models, rather than simple filters.
- nikanj 4y ago
  No. The author downsampled the image to 170x170 pixels and clipped the white levels so that details were turned to uniform white.
Diggsey 4y ago
I think they're probably right about the AI-sharpening using specific knowledge about the moon... However, they are wrong about the detail being gone in the gaussian-blurred image. If they applied a perfect digital gaussian-blur, then that is reversible (except at the edges of the image, which are black in this case anyway). You still lose some detail due to rounding errors, but not nearly as much as you might expect. A gaussian blur (and several other kinds of blur) are a convolution of the image with a specific blur function. A convolution is equivalent to simply multiplying pointwise the two functions in frequency space. As long as you know the blur function exactly, you can divide the final image by the gaussian function in frequency space and get the original image back (modulo rounding errors). It is not totally inconceivable that the AI model could have learned to do this deconvolution with the Gaussian blur function, in order to recover more detail from the image.
- comboy 4y ago
  I wondered that too. I think he should have altered the moon image a bit before applying the filter.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Author did, did it again intentionally CLIPPING detail so there was none, not just blurred gone. It put detail.
    - comboy 4y ago
      I seemed to have read the whole post but didn't notice anything about it, my bad.
- top_sigrid 4y ago
  While the information might be recoverable, the information is not seen by the camera sensor. Hence I think the argument in the post stands. Some AI model/overlay magic is happening, pretending to display information the sensor simply did not receive.
- Cyykratahk 4y ago
t344344 4y ago
Huawei phones did this a few years back. You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures without makeup and photo-shopping. AI beatified pictures have the same criteria.
- justinclift 4y ago
  > You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures without makeup and photo-shopping. That sounds really weird. Any further info?
Aeolun 4y ago
I am not convinced. Looks like a bog standard sharpening alghorithm to me. I’ve taken pictures of the moon at 100x optical zoom, and if Samsung is really faking this they’re doing a truly awful job of it.
rwalle 4y ago
While I understand what the author tries to say, I have to point out that ship has long sailed. Samsung just pushed it a bit too far and slapped a "scene optimizer" label on it. AI has been used in "cell phone photography" for a few years, at lease since Pixel 2 where a mediocre sensor produced much better pictures than what people expect (maybe there are other players who did this even earlier). And every manufacturer started doing it, including Apple. Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just pure magic? Of course not, algorithms are used everywhere. How do you define "fake"? In podcasts, Verge editor Nilay Patel has asked various people "what is a photo", because the concept of a "photo" has become increasingly blurry. That is the question the author is asking, and people may have different answers from the author's.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Photo is an interesting word. It's meaning is clarified by other words, such as photorealism, photofinish. These words will (strictly) lose their meaning if photograph simply means image captured and processed by a device. Curiously and revealingly, the political word photo-op stands alone in this photo- parade of words in the age of photo-imaginings. The universe does indeed have a sense of humor.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  eg "Do We See Through a Microscope?" https://philpapers.org/archive/HACDWS.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/HACDWS.pdf
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  > Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just pure magic? Night mode definitely uses some AI but most of the result is from stacking frames. Samsung here did not label it as a "scene optimizer". Their marketing just calls it Space Zoom. The only disclaimer they provide is "Space Zoom includes digital zoom, which may cause some image deterioration."
  - tooltalk 4y ago
    According to Samsung -- and I just confirmed it on my S22 under Camera -> Camera Setting -- it's called "Scene Optimizer"[1]: [ Overview of moon photography] Since the Galaxy S10, AI technology has been applied to the camera so that users can take the best photos regardless of time and place. To this end, we have developed the Scene Optimizer function, which helps AI to recognize the subject to be photographed and derive the optimal result. From Galaxy S21, even when you take a picture of the moon, ai recognizes the target as the moon through learned data, and multi-frame synthesis and deep learning-based ai technology when shooting. The detail improvement engine function that makes the picture clearer has been applied. Users who want photos as they are without AI technology can disable the optimum shooting function for each scene. [1] https://r1-community-samsung-com.translate.goog/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-%EC%B4%AC%EC%98%81/ba-p/19202094?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB https://r1-community-samsung-com.translate.goog/t5/camcyclop...
drhagen 4y ago
> I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE. This means it's not recoverable, the information is just not there, it's digitally blurred Strictly speaking, applying a Gaussian blur does not destroy the information. You can undo a Gaussian blur with a simple deconvolution, which is something I would expect even a non-AI image enhancement algorithm to do (given that, you know, lenses are involved here). I'd like to see what detail can be "recovered" with just the downsizing, which DOES destroy information.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Well the op did downsize so details had to be reconstructed. Also the noise from having the image being projected through a screen and then a retaken through the camera sensor means that it isn't just your standard perfect convolution.
- padjo 4y ago
  They say they also clipped all whites above a certain level too. That’s just information that’s been destroyed and then invented by the AI right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notatoad 4y ago
  if you downsize an image to 170x170px and then blow it up so it's visible to a camera from across the room without any sort of blurring, it's not going to look like anything and the camera's object detection won't recognize it as the moon - it's just going to look like a huge pixel grid.
  - Jabbles 4y ago
    I am not quite so confident. I would like to see an experiment to test how badly you can distort an image of the moon before the AI stops recognising it.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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dougSF70 4y ago
In this regard, the AI is acting just like the human brain - adding details that may or not be present in what the viewer is seeing. Details that the viewer expects to see, so the brain delivers against this expectation.
COGlory 4y ago
A gaussian blur is not a good test. It does not technically remove all the information from the image. As such this test can't distinguish between unblur or actual moon-pasting. Binning the image, or cropping it in Fourier space, would be a better test.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  They also downscaled it to 170x170 (Which is basically binning) and clipped the highlights at 216 (Which is basically Fourier space cropping)
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Has anyone found a decent use of the 100x zoom on these phones? Could it be that the sheer hype it causes compensates for the extra cost of putting it on the phone? Like, even if nobody uses it it stills turn an overall profit because of the marketing
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Not sure about the current situation, but a couple years ago could receive tons of updoots on Reddit for posting a video how you zoom eg from one side of the harbour to see something on the other side.
tonetheman 4y ago
[dead]
ljlolel 4y ago
Wasn’t this obvious from Day 1
hettygreen 4y ago
This is just make hipsters get into old point and shoot digital cameras... good thing I kept my Canon A540. All the subtle trickery manipulation that the smart phone's doing to reality is concerning. Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, and now plopping fake objects overtop of the real ones. Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality, to the complete inability to photograph certain objects or locations. Imagine dusting off a 30 year old digital camera, finding some AA batteries to put in it, snap a selfie and then realizing just how ugly we all are and how washed out the polluted world actually looks without a bunch of narcissism-pandering enhancements.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  “Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality…” This phrase could cast a broadening net with each year’s new tech.
- seydor 4y ago
  > Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, Our brains do far worse stuff with our memories. Not sure how relevant 'high fidelity' is to people who mostly use phones for memories
  - Retric 4y ago
    I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked into showing the wrong digits, there’s a real problem.
  - worrycue 4y ago
    That’s what photos used to be good for. They don’t fudge stuff like our brains.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      What about and white photos though?
duckqlz 4y ago
I have a few questions: Is this specific for the moon or is the AI generally sharpening around dark areas? If it is specific to the moon then how many common objects does the camera recognize? If you did the same test with a picture of a stop sign or a popular car would the results be similar? Also is this processing done on the camera or does this require an internet connection and work on Samsungs end? I have known about AI image enhancement for years but the idea of recognizing then re-texturing common objects is something I had never considered.
c7DJTLrn 4y ago
It's creepy how deceptive phone cameras are. I've noticed in pictures that I've taken that certain elements have been postprocessed to look better than they actually are.
seba_dos1 4y ago
I'm surprised that some people are surprised.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Blatant but how is this different than all of the other "AI" touchups to things like faces?
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Samsung adds craters to the moon. Imagine your phone added other features to your face.
neogodless 4y ago
Pentax K3-II 300mm: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1082113518809133138/IMGP8315.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1... Sensor: 23.5 x 15.6mm 24MP S21 Ultra: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1039675963270758480/20221108_175904.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1... Telephoto sensor: 3.3 x 4.3mm 10MP (240mm equivalent) Compare side by side: https://imgur.com/a/QwnV99D https://imgur.com/a/QwnV99D
- mannykannot 4y ago
  To be clear, are you saying the difference in orientation was introduced by the camera, or is there something more subtle going on here?
  - neogodless 4y ago
    Orientation is because photos were taken months apart. This is to get an idea of quality, with the APS-C camera having a much larger (26x area) sensor and better optics to work with. My impression is... S21 Ultra "space zoom" is, at best, a good party trick. But if you zoom in, the quality is still nearly garbage. Not an objectively "great photo of the moon."
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      You realize that these photos are to be compared with other phones and not some apsc on tripod, thats a ridiculous premise for everybody understanding 101 of photography that not even Samsung during any release was claiming to beat. It still shows you much more details than visible via eyes, so yeah its a party trick (what else would moon shot on phone be), but pretty darn great at that (I haven't seen so many people with :-O since iphone 1 release when showing this... then they quickly try their top iphones and xiaomis and end up consistently with a small white blob). There is one aspect that this phone wins at easily - it can take that moonshot (TBH it can be a bit sharper than yours) while handheld, pretty consistently. Good luck trying that with your apsc with such a long shutter, it will consistently end up in just a blur. Software often beats raw hardware even these days.
tambourine_man 4y ago
Samsung is such a tasteless company. This is a cool and useful tech, but it obviously needs a good marketing story to avoid looking creepy. To think that no one will notice just makes it worse.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  yeah 5 minutes with their flavor of android makes that apparent, woof
seydor 4y ago
MP3 was perceptually-aware lossy compression. How many people complain about it 20 years later
- aeturnum 4y ago
  First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends! Many sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio. Second - there's nothing wrong with an AI 'enhancement' option. It seems useful! But you should admit what you are doing and have an off switch. Imagine if all of the studio masters for the past 20 years were actually in lossy mp3 because the hardware switched silently?
  - astrange 4y ago
    > First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends! Many sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio. Don't let them tell you this unless they can pass an ABX test.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    They dislike the fact that playing lossy audio
- worrycue 4y ago
  The changes the AI makes are perceptually noticeable though when compared to source. No one complains about image or video compression either if the quality is good enough - because it’s not perceptually noticeable vs uncompressed; people can do A/B testing to be sure.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  MP3 doesn't claim it's lossless. Samsung claims they're not using a moon stamp.
andsoitis 4y ago
tl;dr: AI is used to add detail that doesn't exist to your photos.
syntaxing 4y ago
I think it’s even more damning seeing this happen on the phone near the bottom of the article. There’s no way a phone camera sensor can capture all those raw values of the moon with 45X digital zoom with a phone telephoto lens (you can only see so far with 5 mm of packaging). From a digital sensor point of view, it probably sees a white blob and fires up the AI when it has a contrast and lighting similar to the moon
- duskwuff 4y ago
  What would be even funnier (and more obvious, once people caught on) would be if the phone used its orientation sensors to only activate "Moon Mode" when pointed at the approximate current location of the moon. :)
andsoitis 4y ago
Samsung Galaxy Phone - now hallucinating a more beautiful reality™
furyofantares 4y ago
I took a max-(non-optical)-zoom photo of a rabbit in my yard a while back using an iphone, then further enlarged the result to see how it did - in the details it looked like an impressionistic painting of a rabbit, facing the camera and looking left. The actual rabbit was looking away from the camera and to the right. The eye and face were not visible. https://i.ibb.co/Kz7Sbm2/8-EA85-C12-5-B11-44-D8-9566-461-C98627-E10.jpg https://i.ibb.co/Kz7Sbm2/8-EA85-C12-5-B11-44-D8-9566-461-C98...
- kuschku 4y ago
  Look at pictures on social media in recent months, pretty much every single image looks like this. If you zoom in, they're all inaccurate impressionist paintings. They only look good at original size. It's absolutely painful and encourages me yet again to use my mirrorless camera even more.
  - sushisource 4y ago
    At this point I wish we had legislation requiring a "turn off AI bullshit" option for any camera. Every time I've taken a picture of myself using the camera app built-in to WhatsApp, it blurs the shit out of my face in an attempt to hide blemishes or whatever, and (in a weird sort of reverse-vanity) it really annoys me that it gives the impression I care about looking un-blemished, which I do not. AFAICT, there is no way to turn this off.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Most any image filtering will soften faces even if that's not the point (either by accidentally removing noise or because image stacking doesn't work if there's noise.) If you want it to look "natural" you actually have to make an effort to add the noise back later.
    - chroma 4y ago
      Is there any camera that doesn't let you disable advanced image processing algorithms? It'd have to be some sort of locked-down phone, because there are many camera apps for both Android and iPhone. Also the default camera apps do allow you to disable these features. Nobody is forcing anyone to use fancy image processing algorithms. Having the government intervene for something like this seems like overkill.
mavili 4y ago
So this person has been able to replicate a process that he thinks Samsung must've used, and this is proof? What a load of rubbish this article is! Not denying that Samsung or any other brand would fake things, but this is in no way any proof at all.
- timmaxw 4y ago
  I think you misread the article. What they did was: 1. Use Photoshop to blur a photo of the moon, destroying detail 2. Use a Samsung camera to take a photo of the blurred photo of the moon 3. The camera somehow emits a crisp photo of the moon, including the detail that was destroyed in step 1 It seems like the camera AI detected 'this is a photo of the moon', and used its knowledge of what the moon looks like to add the detail back in. Where else could the camera have gotten the detail from?
  - mavili 4y ago
    Ah yes, now I get it! I either didnt read the article clearly or you outline the steps much better than the article does! My bad.
poniko 4y ago
I tinkered with the idea to let a app use your personal gallery as training data and create a "barney camera"(himym) where 100% of photos of you and your friends would always be perfect, it would be impossible to capture a bad photo.. same here, its the moon just perfect .. who cares its not like it changes ..
albert_e 4y ago
Idea for further testing to prove the hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt: What happens if you manually add a few additional artificial details to your copy of the image -- like a trap street in maps. Does the camera slip up and show flawless moon instead?
- DennisAleynikov 4y ago
  It enhances everything. This reddit user doesn't know what modern photography on a smartphone entails.
- deely3 4y ago
  Or if you skew image a bit, or do a photo of blurred image of another planet, or any absolutly any other black and white blurred photo?
strus 4y ago
How it is possible that people belived that these images are not artificially enchanced? Like it is obvious, there is no way a phone sensor can take such detailed photos of the Moon. I am surprised this was even a discussion.
- crummy 4y ago
  How am I supposed to know how much detail a phone's sensor can capture?
dagss 4y ago
Wait ... a Gaussian blur? That doesn't remove ANY information from the image. It looks blurred to our eyes but the same information is all there. The information is absolutely not gone. Does it state that it hallucinates craters that were not there in the original, or is it possible the filters simply did an FFT, adjusted the power spectrum to what we expect of a non-blurry picture, hence inverting the Gaussian blur? EDIT: Note that a deblur of a smooth but "noisy" image can cause "simulation" or "hallucination" entirely without AI. Could be any number of things causing an output image like that (wavelet sharpening, power spectrum calibration, ...). Even if the information isn't recoverable as such, a photo of a Gaussian blur has an unnatural power spectrum that could easily "trick" conventional non-AI algorithms into doing such things. Especially since the only thing I see in the output is "more detail" (i.e. simply a different power spectrum than the author expected..)
- stilley2 4y ago
  Yeah the author glossed over this a bit in my opinion. In infinite precision math you're correct, but at some point the signal in those higher frequencies is going to be reduced below the precision of the storage data type, never mind the dynamic range of the monitor and camera he's using.
  - dagss 4y ago
    It seems clear the author does not have knowledge on the subject, more than glossing over -- the article even emphasises that information is removed by the blur (100% wrong). I agree it may not have destroyed the experiment entirely, but it does mean the experiment was conducted without knowledge of basic signal processing and I would prefer a more through study or analysis before drawing conclusions...
    - remram 4y ago
      You must have "glossed over" the first part of the statement (emphasis mine): > I *downsized it to 170x170 pixels* and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE
- 4y ago
notorandit 4y ago
Maybe I can get a selfie with my S23 and get a picture of Leo DiCaprio!
CharlesW 4y ago
This issue has been known for a few years. Here's a more thorough analysis from January 2021: "Is the Galaxy S21 Ultra using AI to fake detailed Moon photos?": https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-ultra-using-ai-to-fake-detailed-moon-photos-investigation-super-resolution-analysis https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-... Note that the author decides that Samsung's photos are "not fake", in the sense that they were not doctored after being taken with the phone. However, the article decisively proves that they're being heavily doctored in-camera. Another test would be to shoot RAW + JPEG if the camera supports it. A true RAW image would reveal what the sensor is actually capturing.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Depends. For example Apple can save ProRaw format which DOES include the postprocess magickery, but uncompressed and having more detail for post. BUT, it also provides apps with true RAW, which is true (or very close to true) raw. Two different definitions of "raw" is apparently possible even on the same device.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > For example Apple can save ProRaw format which DOES include the postprocess magickery, but uncompressed and having more detail for post. BUT, it also provides apps with true RAW, which is true (or very close to true) raw. Thank you for that detail. IMO, that makes "ProRAW" a really unfortunate naming decision on Apple's part. And I think you're saying that if you shoot in RAW with, say, Halide, the result will be an actual RAW (pre-demosaic) file in DNG format. A couple of interesting articles on the topic: (1) https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ (2) https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-proraw https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-proraw
calin2k 4y ago
we need "raw" camera apps for our smartfones. like oraganic food, "no AI was used in the making of this photo"
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
The most impressive thing is how dumb the Reddit comments are. Incorrect factual claim after incorrect factual claim. Confidently stated and widely upvoted. Was it always like this? Were we, people always like this?
- yread 4y ago
  Have you read comments here? Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can easily be restored by deconvolution...
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Hah! Those were some of the comments on the original Reddit thread I was commenting on. Glad to see that confident ignorance is alive here too.
  - segfaultbuserr 4y ago
    > Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can easily be restored by deconvolution... I don't think HN (or Reddit) posters are arguing that deconvolution was actually being used, or that it would be practical to do so. Instead, they're just nitpicking about the technical correctness of this particular statement - "the (ir)reversibility of a perfect digital gaussian blur" - even if it doesn't affect the conclusion of the experiment. It's just the standard nerd-sniping as seen in all tech communities... If the debate on whether you can "reverse a photo of a gaussian blur taken by a camera from the monitor" became hot enough, eventually someone may even spend a weekend to code a prototype to show how it actually works better than most people's imagination, with the solely purpose to win an argument on the Internet.
    - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
      Except it’s not actually reversible with finite precision, which is sufficiently implied by “digital”.
segfaultbuserr 4y ago
This problem is not new. In 2019, Huawei introduced a special image processing feature in its smartphone camera app, the "Moon Mode" (opt-in). Missing details are added to the moon photos via machine learning inference from a pre-trained model. Huawei then started marketing these processed images as a showcase of its new smartphone's photography performance. In China, it was widely criticized by tech reviewers [1][2] as misleading, and "Moon Mode" became a running gag among tech enthusiasts for a while. It seems that Samsung simply adopted the same tactic to compete... On the Huawei "Moon Mode" controversy, one can even find a research paper [3] published in a peer-reviewed social studies (!) journal, Media, Culture & Society: > This is where the controversy began: Chinese tech critic Wang’s (2019) posting on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, made quite a splash. In his post, Wang put forward a shocking argument: he said that Huawei’s Moon Mode actually photoshops moon images. He contended that, based on his self-conducted experiments, the system ‘paints in pre-existing imagery’ onto photographed takes, re-constructing details that are not captured in the original shots. Huawei immediately refuted these claims, stressing that the Moon Mode system ‘operates on the same principle as other Master AI modes that recognize and optimize details within an image to help individuals take better photo' [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-controversy-978486/ https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co... [2] https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-Huawei-P-30-Pro-faking-parts-of-photographs_id115554 https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-Huaw... [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064964 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064...
- dcdc123 4y ago
  I knew I saw this before.
- troyvit 4y ago
  It would be so fun to hook a phone up to a telescope and take a picture of, say, Jupiter, and see if it overlays the ringed planet with the moon's characteristics.
  - geor9e 4y ago
teo_zero 4y ago
Does it enhance the moon only, or the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon and Montblanc, too? How long until your phone detects the subject based on geo localization and replaces your shot with a stock image of the subject from an immense database of selected, professional-looking pictures?
- fisian 4y ago
  Someone made a camera that has this "feature": https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restricta.html https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict...
  - efreak 4y ago
    This doesn't replace your photo, it restricts you from taking it entirely
DennisAleynikov 4y ago
Every few months there's a new clown on reddit that doesn't know anything about photography or gaussian blur and tries to expose smartphones for using AI based sharpening and interpolation. Oh nooooo this phones photos come out much sharper than my peanut brain expected!!! Fraud!!!!!!!!!!
- rbits 4y ago
  He didn't just blur it, he downsized it first > I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE.
butz 4y ago
Do we really need cameras at this point? Remove cameras, and just ask user what he is taking photo of, then generate the image.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
  Still need some cheap camera sensor so that you have data to upload to Facebook and the FBI, though. Otherwise, I've hypothesized the same.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
petodo 4y ago
So apparently iPhone and Pixel phones are not adding non existent details to Moon unlike Samsung https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11onztx/uibreakphotos_sent_a_very_interesting_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11onztx/uibreakpho...
- astrange 4y ago
  In my experience the iPhone camera is basically incapable of taking moon photos at all. You just get a 100% white circle.
simoneau 4y ago
Famously, upscaled Obama: https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 I picture someone 20 years from now trying to find out what their parent really looked like when they were young. The obviously smoothed-out face filters are already giving way to AI-powered homogenization. And the filtering is moving deeper down the stack from the app to the camera itself. There will be no "original".
fareesh 4y ago
What happens if you film a crime in the apartment far away and the AI fills in the details?
- segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  This question is less hypothetical than it seems. In recent years, there has been amazing breakthroughs in low-light photography with machine learning, such as [1]. It's not hard to imagine that it would be applied to future surveillance cameras. I imagine that in most cases, the "AI" would work just fine at guessing things. But important edge cases exist, including the possibility of adversarial machine learning spoofing attacks to create false images. Imagine faking a crime scene this way, it would something straight from cyberpunk fiction. [1] Learning to See in the Dark https://cchen156.github.io/SID.html https://cchen156.github.io/SID.html
dwohnitmok 4y ago
Oh but the plot thickens. Was this post itself a result of AI plagiarizing/paraphrasing of another older post? https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/jbuet1x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
f1shy 4y ago
It seems somebody from VW started working at Samsung
gadtfly 4y ago
Officially documented by Samsung in Korean: https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-%EC%B4%AC%EC%98%81/ba-p/19202094 https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-... Ongoing arguments over what this counts as: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_algorithm_for_moon_shots_officially/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_a... https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon
- lucb1e 4y ago
  DeepL.com translation of relevant bit (there's some irony in using ML to be able to read text about ML): > However, the lunar photography environment has physical limitations due to the long distance to the moon and lack of light, so the actual image output from the sensor at high magnification is noisy and not enough to provide the best image quality experience even after compositing multiple images. > To overcome this problem, Galaxy Camera applies an AI detail enhancement engine (Detail Enhancement technology) based on deep learning at the final stage to effectively remove noise and maximize the details of the moon, resulting in bright and clear moon photos. It's not just this one thing, though. It also describes moon detection resulting in: setting brightness, using optical stabilization, "motion sensor data and video analysis"¹ for stabilization (VDIS), and fixing the focus at infinity. The "AI" magic is then described as being a detail enhancer, which could mean anything from {generically decreasing blur and improving contrast} to {applying a model that was purposefully overfit on the moon} (most likely it's the latter). Either way it's fake, obviously, but why do all the effort and make compromises to get a good moon shot if you're going to replace it anyway? > If you shoot the moon in the early evening, the sky around the moon will not be the color of the sky you see, but rather a black sky, which is caused by forcing the image brightness down to capture the moon clearly. [I think this translation should have read "picture brightness"; elsewhere it also says "screen brightness" so I suspect the Korean word for "picture" is ambiguous] So you can't shoot anything near the moon, like if someone is holding the moon up with a hand or something, presumably that would be all black. It's apparently still relying on the sensor to get most of the way there and using ML for the last leg. Imo the feature should spawn a warning on screen "Details of moon filled in by computer and may differ from reality" with buttons for [ok] to quickly dismiss as well as [don't show again]. Then you can't not know that your images are being faked and it's not disingenuous, while most people would still appreciate the better quality because it'll be/work fine in 99% of cases. ¹ summary explanation of VDIS found on https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/CamCyclopedia/VDIS-Video-Digital-Image-Stabilization/ba-p/13351807 https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/CamCyclopedia/VDIS-Video...
ibreakphotos 4y ago
Hey all, it's the author of the reddit post here. First of all, let me say that I don't usually frequent HN, but the comments on here are of such high quality, that I might need to change that. I got semi-depressed on reddit, with people misattributing statements and, in general, not being overly, uh, skeptical :) That being said, there were a few comments on here about gaussian blur and deconvolution, which I would like to tackle. First, I need to mention that I do not have an maths/engineering background. I am familiar with some concepts, as I've used deconvolution via FFT several years ago during my PhD, but while I am aware of the process, I don't know all the details. I certainly didn't know that the image that was gaussian blurred could be sharpened perfectly - I will have to look into that. In fact, I used gaussian blur to redact some private information (like in screenshots), and it's very helpful to know if I haven't redacted anything and the data is recoverable. Wow. I would love to learn more about the types of blur that cannot be deconvoluted. However, please have in mind that in my experiment: 1) I also downsampled the image to 170x170, which, as far as I know, is an information-destructive process 2) The camera doesn't have the access to my original gaussian blurred image, but that image + whatever blur and distortion was introduced when I was taking the photo from far away, (whatever algo they are using doesn't have access to the original blurred image to run a perfect deconvolution on) 3) Lastly, I also clipped the highlights in the last example, which is also destructive (non-reversible), and the AI hallucinated details there as well So I am comfortable saying that it's not deconvolution which "unblurs" the image and sharpens the details, but what I said - an AI model trained on moon images that uses image matching and a neural network to fill in the data. Thank you again for your engagement and your thoughtful comments, I really appreciate them, and have learned a lot just by reading them!
- tethys 4y ago
  Should be rather easy to prove if Samsung is really able to „unblur“ an image in that way: use something else than an image of the moon as starting point and apply the same steps, i.e. down sizing and blur, then take a photo and see if it’s able to recover details.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > In fact, I used gaussian blur to redact some private information Absolutely never do that. I honestly don't understand why people still do, given that it's obvious that low levels of blur can be reversed why even risk guessing until what point someone might be able to recover anything? Just censor it, draw over it with an opaque tool, and save it in a format that won't store layers or undo history or something (the riskiest format being pdf). If you don't like how that looks, the alternative is to replace the information and then blur it. They can unblur but will find an easter egg at best. Personally, I censor instead of blurring a replacement, but I balance between low contrast and not hiding the fact that information was removed. A stark contrast distracts and looks ugly. E.g., for black text on a white background, I'd pick a light/medium gray (around the average black level of the original text, basically).
astrange 4y ago
Am I supposed to be convinced by this? Cause I'm not. It looks more like moon mode is assembling fake detail out of shot noise from a photo being taken in the dark indoors. That's enough to cancel out his blurring and all that. Even if it is guided upsampling with a "this is a moon prior", so what? That's not "fake", it's constrained by the picture you took.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway81523 4y ago
That's not a moon, it's a space station.
ibreakphotos 4y ago
OP here again. I photoshopped one moon next to another (to see if one moon would get the AI treatment, while another would not), and managed to coax the AI to do exactly that. This is the image that I used, which contains 2 blurred moons: https://imgur.com/kMv1XAx https://imgur.com/kMv1XAx I replicated my original setup, shot the monitor from across the room, and got this: https://imgur.com/RSHAz1l https://imgur.com/RSHAz1l As you can see, one moon got the "AI enhancement", while the other one shows what was actually visible to the sensor - a blurry mess I think this settles it.
tagyro 4y ago
Samsung is a corrupt company with a corrupt culture. Starting from the top - bribery, embezzlement, illegal transactions, stock manipulation, perjury - all the way down to their "partners". They've been caught multiple times lying in their products description. I won't add links as there are too many, but a quick search for Samsung and the keywords I mentioned will bring many results. (let the downvoting begin)

1024 points by petodo 4y ago

Samsung is learning the best from Huawei https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-controversy-978486/ https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

I guess the old "seeing is believing" can be thrown out the window nowadays.

mejutoco 4y ago
With photographs it was never true. This is the classical text on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
swayvil 4y ago
But it isn't seeing, right? I mean, seeing a digital image of a thing is totally different from seeing the actual thing. A digital image is a representation/abstraction/map kind of thing. And then a little bit of mental shorthand inside your head makes a connection and declares the thing and the representation-of-the-thing to be one and the same. But it isn't the same thing. Not by a million miles. It's a socially-accepted mindfuck is what it is.

abybaddi009 4y ago

Does DxOMark penalize such falsifications?

codetrotter 4y ago
Who is DxOMark?
- Semaphor 4y ago
  It’s camera testing software.
- abybaddi009 4y ago
  They are a organization that perform benchmarks. Here's a link: https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/ https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    It’s also the name of the software they, and others, use. Though I guess the actual software has the generic name "Analyzer": https://corp.dxomark.com/analyzer/ https://corp.dxomark.com/analyzer/

kevincox 4y ago

I'm not very convinced. It looks like they are doing some processing, maybe special to the moon but it looks more like some form of sharpening or contrast boosting than adding detail. In all of the examples it seems that there is information in the original (dark spots) that are getting boosted. It would be interesting to see this tried on a source image that isn't the moon. Just white with a few dark spots. Does it actually add in completely new craters, or just where there are existing smudges? Or do something like half of a moon photo and have white, does it add craters to the white side? The OP tried to do this by changing the contrast but I failed to see any craters appearing where there wasn't already dark spots in the source photo. It does seem strange that the OP is using an image of the moon to start and that they don't provide a still shot of the one where they modified the brightness levels to cause clipping. It doesn't really "drive the point home" as claimed. Of course the answer to these may be that you need something moon-like enough to trigger the moon optimizations. But if that is the answer it would be interesting to see something that comes right up to the threshold where it either snaps in and out of these optimizations or two very similar images produce widely different results.

Majromax 4y ago
> In all of the examples it seems that there is information in the original (dark spots) that are getting boosted. That was the point of the Gaussian blur. By blurring the source image of the moon before taking its picture, there was no information. The Gaussian blur destroys fine detail, by design. The image enhancement applied by the Samsung phone is adding detail where there was none originally – not just detail that might be buried in the optics somewhere, but not there at all. It involves a computational model of what the target (here the moon) "should" look like and guesses at what it thinks are the blurry bits.
- kevincox 4y ago
  But I don't see it adding any detail over the blur. It really just looks like it is boosting contrast a bit on top of the blur. I don't see anything like ridges or defined features appearing.
- madaxe_again 4y ago

whatisthiseven 4y ago

Imagine this future: Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned servers is cheap. You take a picture on a crappy camera, and Samsung uses AI to "fix" everything. It knows what stop signs, roadways, busses, cars, stop lights, and more should look like, and so it just uses AI to replace all the textures. Samsung sells what's on the image to advertisers and more with the hallucinated data. People can't tell the difference and don't know. They "just want a good looking picture". People further use AI to alter images for virtual likes on Tiktok and Insta. This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models that all seem to think objects further away have greater detail, clarity, and cleanliness than they should. You look at a picture of a park you took, years before, and could have sworn the flowers were more pink, and not as red. You are assured, by your friend who knows it all, that people's memories are fallible; hallucinating details, colors, objects, sizes, and more. The image, your friend assures you further? "Advanced tech captured its pure form perfectly". And thus, everyone will demand more clarity, precision, details, and color where their eyes don't remember seeing.

cjsawyer 4y ago
This is my exact worry with things like chat gpt polluting the scrapable internet. The feedback loop might eventually ruin whatever value the models currently have by filling them with incorrect but plentiful generated nonsense.
dusted 4y ago
Basically this.. As "neat" as AI "improvement" is, I don't think it has any actual value, I can't come up with any use-case where I can accept it. "Make pictures look good by just hallucinating stuff" is one of the harder ones to explain, but you did it well.. Another thing, pictures for proof and documentation, maybe not when they're taken but after the fact, for historical reasons, or forensics.. We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken. (Yes, I know that photoshop is a thing, but that's a very deliberate action, which I believe it should be)
- 4y ago

braho 4y ago

I guess there is some AI algorithm that does zoom as postprocessing. That AI knows the moon so it can fill in the blanks and compensate for a (relatively) crappy sensor. So in the future, there are either cameras that can see what others have seen before, and those that can truly capture new, true, detail (true as in, without filling it with estimations)

gus_massa 4y ago

Can it be just deconvolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution The Gaussian blur they applied is theoretically reversible in a continuous function and infinite precision. In a discrete function (like a image in the computer) and only a few dozens of bits it's not 100% reversible, but it can be partially undone and get a sharper image (that is not as sharp as the initial image).

danuker 4y ago
I guess one way to tell whether the image is processed locally is by disabling every connection, and seeing if the pics still look good. But there still might be advanced machine learning models, rather than simple filters.
nikanj 4y ago
No. The author downsampled the image to 170x170 pixels and clipped the white levels so that details were turned to uniform white.

Diggsey 4y ago

I think they're probably right about the AI-sharpening using specific knowledge about the moon... However, they are wrong about the detail being gone in the gaussian-blurred image. If they applied a perfect digital gaussian-blur, then that is reversible (except at the edges of the image, which are black in this case anyway). You still lose some detail due to rounding errors, but not nearly as much as you might expect. A gaussian blur (and several other kinds of blur) are a convolution of the image with a specific blur function. A convolution is equivalent to simply multiplying pointwise the two functions in frequency space. As long as you know the blur function exactly, you can divide the final image by the gaussian function in frequency space and get the original image back (modulo rounding errors). It is not totally inconceivable that the AI model could have learned to do this deconvolution with the Gaussian blur function, in order to recover more detail from the image.

comboy 4y ago
I wondered that too. I think he should have altered the moon image a bit before applying the filter.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Author did, did it again intentionally CLIPPING detail so there was none, not just blurred gone. It put detail.
  - comboy 4y ago
    I seemed to have read the whole post but didn't notice anything about it, my bad.
top_sigrid 4y ago
While the information might be recoverable, the information is not seen by the camera sensor. Hence I think the argument in the post stands. Some AI model/overlay magic is happening, pretending to display information the sensor simply did not receive.
Cyykratahk 4y ago

t344344 4y ago

Huawei phones did this a few years back. You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures without makeup and photo-shopping. AI beatified pictures have the same criteria.

justinclift 4y ago
> You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures without makeup and photo-shopping. That sounds really weird. Any further info?

Aeolun 4y ago

I am not convinced. Looks like a bog standard sharpening alghorithm to me. I’ve taken pictures of the moon at 100x optical zoom, and if Samsung is really faking this they’re doing a truly awful job of it.

rwalle 4y ago

While I understand what the author tries to say, I have to point out that ship has long sailed. Samsung just pushed it a bit too far and slapped a "scene optimizer" label on it. AI has been used in "cell phone photography" for a few years, at lease since Pixel 2 where a mediocre sensor produced much better pictures than what people expect (maybe there are other players who did this even earlier). And every manufacturer started doing it, including Apple. Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just pure magic? Of course not, algorithms are used everywhere. How do you define "fake"? In podcasts, Verge editor Nilay Patel has asked various people "what is a photo", because the concept of a "photo" has become increasingly blurry. That is the question the author is asking, and people may have different answers from the author's.

eternalban 4y ago
Photo is an interesting word. It's meaning is clarified by other words, such as photorealism, photofinish. These words will (strictly) lose their meaning if photograph simply means image captured and processed by a device. Curiously and revealingly, the political word photo-op stands alone in this photo- parade of words in the age of photo-imaginings. The universe does indeed have a sense of humor.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
eg "Do We See Through a Microscope?" https://philpapers.org/archive/HACDWS.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/HACDWS.pdf
squeaky-clean 4y ago
> Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just pure magic? Night mode definitely uses some AI but most of the result is from stacking frames. Samsung here did not label it as a "scene optimizer". Their marketing just calls it Space Zoom. The only disclaimer they provide is "Space Zoom includes digital zoom, which may cause some image deterioration."
- tooltalk 4y ago
  According to Samsung -- and I just confirmed it on my S22 under Camera -> Camera Setting -- it's called "Scene Optimizer"[1]: [ Overview of moon photography] Since the Galaxy S10, AI technology has been applied to the camera so that users can take the best photos regardless of time and place. To this end, we have developed the Scene Optimizer function, which helps AI to recognize the subject to be photographed and derive the optimal result. From Galaxy S21, even when you take a picture of the moon, ai recognizes the target as the moon through learned data, and multi-frame synthesis and deep learning-based ai technology when shooting. The detail improvement engine function that makes the picture clearer has been applied. Users who want photos as they are without AI technology can disable the optimum shooting function for each scene. [1] https://r1-community-samsung-com.translate.goog/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-%EC%B4%AC%EC%98%81/ba-p/19202094?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB https://r1-community-samsung-com.translate.goog/t5/camcyclop...

drhagen 4y ago

> I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE. This means it's not recoverable, the information is just not there, it's digitally blurred Strictly speaking, applying a Gaussian blur does not destroy the information. You can undo a Gaussian blur with a simple deconvolution, which is something I would expect even a non-AI image enhancement algorithm to do (given that, you know, lenses are involved here). I'd like to see what detail can be "recovered" with just the downsizing, which DOES destroy information.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
Well the op did downsize so details had to be reconstructed. Also the noise from having the image being projected through a screen and then a retaken through the camera sensor means that it isn't just your standard perfect convolution.
padjo 4y ago
They say they also clipped all whites above a certain level too. That’s just information that’s been destroyed and then invented by the AI right?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 4y ago
if you downsize an image to 170x170px and then blow it up so it's visible to a camera from across the room without any sort of blurring, it's not going to look like anything and the camera's object detection won't recognize it as the moon - it's just going to look like a huge pixel grid.
- Jabbles 4y ago
  I am not quite so confident. I would like to see an experiment to test how badly you can distort an image of the moon before the AI stops recognising it.
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dougSF70 4y ago

In this regard, the AI is acting just like the human brain - adding details that may or not be present in what the viewer is seeing. Details that the viewer expects to see, so the brain delivers against this expectation.

COGlory 4y ago

A gaussian blur is not a good test. It does not technically remove all the information from the image. As such this test can't distinguish between unblur or actual moon-pasting. Binning the image, or cropping it in Fourier space, would be a better test.

squeaky-clean 4y ago
They also downscaled it to 170x170 (Which is basically binning) and clipped the highlights at 216 (Which is basically Fourier space cropping)

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

Has anyone found a decent use of the 100x zoom on these phones? Could it be that the sheer hype it causes compensates for the extra cost of putting it on the phone? Like, even if nobody uses it it stills turn an overall profit because of the marketing

justsomehnguy 4y ago
Not sure about the current situation, but a couple years ago could receive tons of updoots on Reddit for posting a video how you zoom eg from one side of the harbour to see something on the other side.

tonetheman 4y ago

[dead]

ljlolel 4y ago

Wasn’t this obvious from Day 1

hettygreen 4y ago

This is just make hipsters get into old point and shoot digital cameras... good thing I kept my Canon A540. All the subtle trickery manipulation that the smart phone's doing to reality is concerning. Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, and now plopping fake objects overtop of the real ones. Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality, to the complete inability to photograph certain objects or locations. Imagine dusting off a 30 year old digital camera, finding some AA batteries to put in it, snap a selfie and then realizing just how ugly we all are and how washed out the polluted world actually looks without a bunch of narcissism-pandering enhancements.

germinalphrase 4y ago
“Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality…” This phrase could cast a broadening net with each year’s new tech.
seydor 4y ago
> Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, Our brains do far worse stuff with our memories. Not sure how relevant 'high fidelity' is to people who mostly use phones for memories
- Retric 4y ago
  I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked into showing the wrong digits, there’s a real problem.
- worrycue 4y ago
  That’s what photos used to be good for. They don’t fudge stuff like our brains.
  - paulcole 4y ago
    What about and white photos though?

duckqlz 4y ago

I have a few questions: Is this specific for the moon or is the AI generally sharpening around dark areas? If it is specific to the moon then how many common objects does the camera recognize? If you did the same test with a picture of a stop sign or a popular car would the results be similar? Also is this processing done on the camera or does this require an internet connection and work on Samsungs end? I have known about AI image enhancement for years but the idea of recognizing then re-texturing common objects is something I had never considered.

c7DJTLrn 4y ago

It's creepy how deceptive phone cameras are. I've noticed in pictures that I've taken that certain elements have been postprocessed to look better than they actually are.

seba_dos1 4y ago

I'm surprised that some people are surprised.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Blatant but how is this different than all of the other "AI" touchups to things like faces?

andsoitis 4y ago
Samsung adds craters to the moon. Imagine your phone added other features to your face.

neogodless 4y ago

Pentax K3-II 300mm: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1082113518809133138/IMGP8315.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1... Sensor: 23.5 x 15.6mm 24MP S21 Ultra: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1039675963270758480/20221108_175904.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1... Telephoto sensor: 3.3 x 4.3mm 10MP (240mm equivalent) Compare side by side: https://imgur.com/a/QwnV99D https://imgur.com/a/QwnV99D

mannykannot 4y ago
To be clear, are you saying the difference in orientation was introduced by the camera, or is there something more subtle going on here?
- neogodless 4y ago
  Orientation is because photos were taken months apart. This is to get an idea of quality, with the APS-C camera having a much larger (26x area) sensor and better optics to work with. My impression is... S21 Ultra "space zoom" is, at best, a good party trick. But if you zoom in, the quality is still nearly garbage. Not an objectively "great photo of the moon."
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    You realize that these photos are to be compared with other phones and not some apsc on tripod, thats a ridiculous premise for everybody understanding 101 of photography that not even Samsung during any release was claiming to beat. It still shows you much more details than visible via eyes, so yeah its a party trick (what else would moon shot on phone be), but pretty darn great at that (I haven't seen so many people with :-O since iphone 1 release when showing this... then they quickly try their top iphones and xiaomis and end up consistently with a small white blob). There is one aspect that this phone wins at easily - it can take that moonshot (TBH it can be a bit sharper than yours) while handheld, pretty consistently. Good luck trying that with your apsc with such a long shutter, it will consistently end up in just a blur. Software often beats raw hardware even these days.

tambourine_man 4y ago

Samsung is such a tasteless company. This is a cool and useful tech, but it obviously needs a good marketing story to avoid looking creepy. To think that no one will notice just makes it worse.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
yeah 5 minutes with their flavor of android makes that apparent, woof

seydor 4y ago

MP3 was perceptually-aware lossy compression. How many people complain about it 20 years later

aeturnum 4y ago
First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends! Many sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio. Second - there's nothing wrong with an AI 'enhancement' option. It seems useful! But you should admit what you are doing and have an off switch. Imagine if all of the studio masters for the past 20 years were actually in lossy mp3 because the hardware switched silently?
- astrange 4y ago
  > First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends! Many sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio. Don't let them tell you this unless they can pass an ABX test.
- fomine3 4y ago
  They dislike the fact that playing lossy audio
worrycue 4y ago
The changes the AI makes are perceptually noticeable though when compared to source. No one complains about image or video compression either if the quality is good enough - because it’s not perceptually noticeable vs uncompressed; people can do A/B testing to be sure.
squeaky-clean 4y ago
MP3 doesn't claim it's lossless. Samsung claims they're not using a moon stamp.

andsoitis 4y ago

tl;dr: AI is used to add detail that doesn't exist to your photos.

syntaxing 4y ago

I think it’s even more damning seeing this happen on the phone near the bottom of the article. There’s no way a phone camera sensor can capture all those raw values of the moon with 45X digital zoom with a phone telephoto lens (you can only see so far with 5 mm of packaging). From a digital sensor point of view, it probably sees a white blob and fires up the AI when it has a contrast and lighting similar to the moon

duskwuff 4y ago
What would be even funnier (and more obvious, once people caught on) would be if the phone used its orientation sensors to only activate "Moon Mode" when pointed at the approximate current location of the moon. :)

andsoitis 4y ago

Samsung Galaxy Phone - now hallucinating a more beautiful reality™

furyofantares 4y ago

I took a max-(non-optical)-zoom photo of a rabbit in my yard a while back using an iphone, then further enlarged the result to see how it did - in the details it looked like an impressionistic painting of a rabbit, facing the camera and looking left. The actual rabbit was looking away from the camera and to the right. The eye and face were not visible. https://i.ibb.co/Kz7Sbm2/8-EA85-C12-5-B11-44-D8-9566-461-C98627-E10.jpg https://i.ibb.co/Kz7Sbm2/8-EA85-C12-5-B11-44-D8-9566-461-C98...

kuschku 4y ago
Look at pictures on social media in recent months, pretty much every single image looks like this. If you zoom in, they're all inaccurate impressionist paintings. They only look good at original size. It's absolutely painful and encourages me yet again to use my mirrorless camera even more.
- sushisource 4y ago
  At this point I wish we had legislation requiring a "turn off AI bullshit" option for any camera. Every time I've taken a picture of myself using the camera app built-in to WhatsApp, it blurs the shit out of my face in an attempt to hide blemishes or whatever, and (in a weird sort of reverse-vanity) it really annoys me that it gives the impression I care about looking un-blemished, which I do not. AFAICT, there is no way to turn this off.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Most any image filtering will soften faces even if that's not the point (either by accidentally removing noise or because image stacking doesn't work if there's noise.) If you want it to look "natural" you actually have to make an effort to add the noise back later.
  - chroma 4y ago
    Is there any camera that doesn't let you disable advanced image processing algorithms? It'd have to be some sort of locked-down phone, because there are many camera apps for both Android and iPhone. Also the default camera apps do allow you to disable these features. Nobody is forcing anyone to use fancy image processing algorithms. Having the government intervene for something like this seems like overkill.

mavili 4y ago

So this person has been able to replicate a process that he thinks Samsung must've used, and this is proof? What a load of rubbish this article is! Not denying that Samsung or any other brand would fake things, but this is in no way any proof at all.

timmaxw 4y ago
I think you misread the article. What they did was: 1. Use Photoshop to blur a photo of the moon, destroying detail 2. Use a Samsung camera to take a photo of the blurred photo of the moon 3. The camera somehow emits a crisp photo of the moon, including the detail that was destroyed in step 1 It seems like the camera AI detected 'this is a photo of the moon', and used its knowledge of what the moon looks like to add the detail back in. Where else could the camera have gotten the detail from?
- mavili 4y ago
  Ah yes, now I get it! I either didnt read the article clearly or you outline the steps much better than the article does! My bad.

poniko 4y ago

I tinkered with the idea to let a app use your personal gallery as training data and create a "barney camera"(himym) where 100% of photos of you and your friends would always be perfect, it would be impossible to capture a bad photo.. same here, its the moon just perfect .. who cares its not like it changes ..

albert_e 4y ago

Idea for further testing to prove the hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt: What happens if you manually add a few additional artificial details to your copy of the image -- like a trap street in maps. Does the camera slip up and show flawless moon instead?

DennisAleynikov 4y ago
It enhances everything. This reddit user doesn't know what modern photography on a smartphone entails.
deely3 4y ago
Or if you skew image a bit, or do a photo of blurred image of another planet, or any absolutly any other black and white blurred photo?

strus 4y ago

How it is possible that people belived that these images are not artificially enchanced? Like it is obvious, there is no way a phone sensor can take such detailed photos of the Moon. I am surprised this was even a discussion.

crummy 4y ago
How am I supposed to know how much detail a phone's sensor can capture?

dagss 4y ago

Wait ... a Gaussian blur? That doesn't remove ANY information from the image. It looks blurred to our eyes but the same information is all there. The information is absolutely not gone. Does it state that it hallucinates craters that were not there in the original, or is it possible the filters simply did an FFT, adjusted the power spectrum to what we expect of a non-blurry picture, hence inverting the Gaussian blur? EDIT: Note that a deblur of a smooth but "noisy" image can cause "simulation" or "hallucination" entirely without AI. Could be any number of things causing an output image like that (wavelet sharpening, power spectrum calibration, ...). Even if the information isn't recoverable as such, a photo of a Gaussian blur has an unnatural power spectrum that could easily "trick" conventional non-AI algorithms into doing such things. Especially since the only thing I see in the output is "more detail" (i.e. simply a different power spectrum than the author expected..)

stilley2 4y ago
Yeah the author glossed over this a bit in my opinion. In infinite precision math you're correct, but at some point the signal in those higher frequencies is going to be reduced below the precision of the storage data type, never mind the dynamic range of the monitor and camera he's using.
- dagss 4y ago
  It seems clear the author does not have knowledge on the subject, more than glossing over -- the article even emphasises that information is removed by the blur (100% wrong). I agree it may not have destroyed the experiment entirely, but it does mean the experiment was conducted without knowledge of basic signal processing and I would prefer a more through study or analysis before drawing conclusions...
  - remram 4y ago
    You must have "glossed over" the first part of the statement (emphasis mine): > I *downsized it to 170x170 pixels* and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE
4y ago

notorandit 4y ago

Maybe I can get a selfie with my S23 and get a picture of Leo DiCaprio!

CharlesW 4y ago

This issue has been known for a few years. Here's a more thorough analysis from January 2021: "Is the Galaxy S21 Ultra using AI to fake detailed Moon photos?": https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-ultra-using-ai-to-fake-detailed-moon-photos-investigation-super-resolution-analysis https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-... Note that the author decides that Samsung's photos are "not fake", in the sense that they were not doctored after being taken with the phone. However, the article decisively proves that they're being heavily doctored in-camera. Another test would be to shoot RAW + JPEG if the camera supports it. A true RAW image would reveal what the sensor is actually capturing.

can16358p 4y ago
Depends. For example Apple can save ProRaw format which DOES include the postprocess magickery, but uncompressed and having more detail for post. BUT, it also provides apps with true RAW, which is true (or very close to true) raw. Two different definitions of "raw" is apparently possible even on the same device.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > For example Apple can save ProRaw format which DOES include the postprocess magickery, but uncompressed and having more detail for post. BUT, it also provides apps with true RAW, which is true (or very close to true) raw. Thank you for that detail. IMO, that makes "ProRAW" a really unfortunate naming decision on Apple's part. And I think you're saying that if you shoot in RAW with, say, Halide, the result will be an actual RAW (pre-demosaic) file in DNG format. A couple of interesting articles on the topic: (1) https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/ (2) https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-proraw https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-proraw

calin2k 4y ago

we need "raw" camera apps for our smartfones. like oraganic food, "no AI was used in the making of this photo"

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

The most impressive thing is how dumb the Reddit comments are. Incorrect factual claim after incorrect factual claim. Confidently stated and widely upvoted. Was it always like this? Were we, people always like this?

yread 4y ago
Have you read comments here? Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can easily be restored by deconvolution...
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Hah! Those were some of the comments on the original Reddit thread I was commenting on. Glad to see that confident ignorance is alive here too.
- segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  > Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can easily be restored by deconvolution... I don't think HN (or Reddit) posters are arguing that deconvolution was actually being used, or that it would be practical to do so. Instead, they're just nitpicking about the technical correctness of this particular statement - "the (ir)reversibility of a perfect digital gaussian blur" - even if it doesn't affect the conclusion of the experiment. It's just the standard nerd-sniping as seen in all tech communities... If the debate on whether you can "reverse a photo of a gaussian blur taken by a camera from the monitor" became hot enough, eventually someone may even spend a weekend to code a prototype to show how it actually works better than most people's imagination, with the solely purpose to win an argument on the Internet.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Except it’s not actually reversible with finite precision, which is sufficiently implied by “digital”.

segfaultbuserr 4y ago

This problem is not new. In 2019, Huawei introduced a special image processing feature in its smartphone camera app, the "Moon Mode" (opt-in). Missing details are added to the moon photos via machine learning inference from a pre-trained model. Huawei then started marketing these processed images as a showcase of its new smartphone's photography performance. In China, it was widely criticized by tech reviewers [1][2] as misleading, and "Moon Mode" became a running gag among tech enthusiasts for a while. It seems that Samsung simply adopted the same tactic to compete... On the Huawei "Moon Mode" controversy, one can even find a research paper [3] published in a peer-reviewed social studies (!) journal, Media, Culture & Society: > This is where the controversy began: Chinese tech critic Wang’s (2019) posting on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, made quite a splash. In his post, Wang put forward a shocking argument: he said that Huawei’s Moon Mode actually photoshops moon images. He contended that, based on his self-conducted experiments, the system ‘paints in pre-existing imagery’ onto photographed takes, re-constructing details that are not captured in the original shots. Huawei immediately refuted these claims, stressing that the Moon Mode system ‘operates on the same principle as other Master AI modes that recognize and optimize details within an image to help individuals take better photo' [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-controversy-978486/ https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co... [2] https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-Huawei-P-30-Pro-faking-parts-of-photographs_id115554 https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-Huaw... [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064964 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064...

dcdc123 4y ago
I knew I saw this before.
troyvit 4y ago
It would be so fun to hook a phone up to a telescope and take a picture of, say, Jupiter, and see if it overlays the ringed planet with the moon's characteristics.
- geor9e 4y ago

teo_zero 4y ago

Does it enhance the moon only, or the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon and Montblanc, too? How long until your phone detects the subject based on geo localization and replaces your shot with a stock image of the subject from an immense database of selected, professional-looking pictures?

fisian 4y ago
Someone made a camera that has this "feature": https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restricta.html https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict...
- efreak 4y ago
  This doesn't replace your photo, it restricts you from taking it entirely

DennisAleynikov 4y ago

Every few months there's a new clown on reddit that doesn't know anything about photography or gaussian blur and tries to expose smartphones for using AI based sharpening and interpolation. Oh nooooo this phones photos come out much sharper than my peanut brain expected!!! Fraud!!!!!!!!!!

rbits 4y ago
He didn't just blur it, he downsized it first > I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE.

butz 4y ago

Do we really need cameras at this point? Remove cameras, and just ask user what he is taking photo of, then generate the image.

sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
Still need some cheap camera sensor so that you have data to upload to Facebook and the FBI, though. Otherwise, I've hypothesized the same.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

petodo 4y ago

So apparently iPhone and Pixel phones are not adding non existent details to Moon unlike Samsung https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11onztx/uibreakphotos_sent_a_very_interesting_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11onztx/uibreakpho...

astrange 4y ago
In my experience the iPhone camera is basically incapable of taking moon photos at all. You just get a 100% white circle.

simoneau 4y ago

Famously, upscaled Obama: https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801 I picture someone 20 years from now trying to find out what their parent really looked like when they were young. The obviously smoothed-out face filters are already giving way to AI-powered homogenization. And the filtering is moving deeper down the stack from the app to the camera itself. There will be no "original".

fareesh 4y ago

What happens if you film a crime in the apartment far away and the AI fills in the details?

segfaultbuserr 4y ago
This question is less hypothetical than it seems. In recent years, there has been amazing breakthroughs in low-light photography with machine learning, such as [1]. It's not hard to imagine that it would be applied to future surveillance cameras. I imagine that in most cases, the "AI" would work just fine at guessing things. But important edge cases exist, including the possibility of adversarial machine learning spoofing attacks to create false images. Imagine faking a crime scene this way, it would something straight from cyberpunk fiction. [1] Learning to See in the Dark https://cchen156.github.io/SID.html https://cchen156.github.io/SID.html

dwohnitmok 4y ago

Oh but the plot thickens. Was this post itself a result of AI plagiarizing/paraphrasing of another older post? https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/jbuet1x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

f1shy 4y ago

It seems somebody from VW started working at Samsung

gadtfly 4y ago

Officially documented by Samsung in Korean: https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-%EC%B4%AC%EC%98%81/ba-p/19202094 https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-... Ongoing arguments over what this counts as: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_algorithm_for_moon_shots_officially/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_a... https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon

lucb1e 4y ago
DeepL.com translation of relevant bit (there's some irony in using ML to be able to read text about ML): > However, the lunar photography environment has physical limitations due to the long distance to the moon and lack of light, so the actual image output from the sensor at high magnification is noisy and not enough to provide the best image quality experience even after compositing multiple images. > To overcome this problem, Galaxy Camera applies an AI detail enhancement engine (Detail Enhancement technology) based on deep learning at the final stage to effectively remove noise and maximize the details of the moon, resulting in bright and clear moon photos. It's not just this one thing, though. It also describes moon detection resulting in: setting brightness, using optical stabilization, "motion sensor data and video analysis"¹ for stabilization (VDIS), and fixing the focus at infinity. The "AI" magic is then described as being a detail enhancer, which could mean anything from {generically decreasing blur and improving contrast} to {applying a model that was purposefully overfit on the moon} (most likely it's the latter). Either way it's fake, obviously, but why do all the effort and make compromises to get a good moon shot if you're going to replace it anyway? > If you shoot the moon in the early evening, the sky around the moon will not be the color of the sky you see, but rather a black sky, which is caused by forcing the image brightness down to capture the moon clearly. [I think this translation should have read "picture brightness"; elsewhere it also says "screen brightness" so I suspect the Korean word for "picture" is ambiguous] So you can't shoot anything near the moon, like if someone is holding the moon up with a hand or something, presumably that would be all black. It's apparently still relying on the sensor to get most of the way there and using ML for the last leg. Imo the feature should spawn a warning on screen "Details of moon filled in by computer and may differ from reality" with buttons for [ok] to quickly dismiss as well as [don't show again]. Then you can't not know that your images are being faked and it's not disingenuous, while most people would still appreciate the better quality because it'll be/work fine in 99% of cases. ¹ summary explanation of VDIS found on https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/CamCyclopedia/VDIS-Video-Digital-Image-Stabilization/ba-p/13351807 https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/CamCyclopedia/VDIS-Video...

ibreakphotos 4y ago

Hey all, it's the author of the reddit post here. First of all, let me say that I don't usually frequent HN, but the comments on here are of such high quality, that I might need to change that. I got semi-depressed on reddit, with people misattributing statements and, in general, not being overly, uh, skeptical :) That being said, there were a few comments on here about gaussian blur and deconvolution, which I would like to tackle. First, I need to mention that I do not have an maths/engineering background. I am familiar with some concepts, as I've used deconvolution via FFT several years ago during my PhD, but while I am aware of the process, I don't know all the details. I certainly didn't know that the image that was gaussian blurred could be sharpened perfectly - I will have to look into that. In fact, I used gaussian blur to redact some private information (like in screenshots), and it's very helpful to know if I haven't redacted anything and the data is recoverable. Wow. I would love to learn more about the types of blur that cannot be deconvoluted. However, please have in mind that in my experiment: 1) I also downsampled the image to 170x170, which, as far as I know, is an information-destructive process 2) The camera doesn't have the access to my original gaussian blurred image, but that image + whatever blur and distortion was introduced when I was taking the photo from far away, (whatever algo they are using doesn't have access to the original blurred image to run a perfect deconvolution on) 3) Lastly, I also clipped the highlights in the last example, which is also destructive (non-reversible), and the AI hallucinated details there as well So I am comfortable saying that it's not deconvolution which "unblurs" the image and sharpens the details, but what I said - an AI model trained on moon images that uses image matching and a neural network to fill in the data. Thank you again for your engagement and your thoughtful comments, I really appreciate them, and have learned a lot just by reading them!

tethys 4y ago
Should be rather easy to prove if Samsung is really able to „unblur“ an image in that way: use something else than an image of the moon as starting point and apply the same steps, i.e. down sizing and blur, then take a photo and see if it’s able to recover details.
lucb1e 4y ago
> In fact, I used gaussian blur to redact some private information Absolutely never do that. I honestly don't understand why people still do, given that it's obvious that low levels of blur can be reversed why even risk guessing until what point someone might be able to recover anything? Just censor it, draw over it with an opaque tool, and save it in a format that won't store layers or undo history or something (the riskiest format being pdf). If you don't like how that looks, the alternative is to replace the information and then blur it. They can unblur but will find an easter egg at best. Personally, I censor instead of blurring a replacement, but I balance between low contrast and not hiding the fact that information was removed. A stark contrast distracts and looks ugly. E.g., for black text on a white background, I'd pick a light/medium gray (around the average black level of the original text, basically).

astrange 4y ago

Am I supposed to be convinced by this? Cause I'm not. It looks more like moon mode is assembling fake detail out of shot noise from a photo being taken in the dark indoors. That's enough to cancel out his blurring and all that. Even if it is guided upsampling with a "this is a moon prior", so what? That's not "fake", it's constrained by the picture you took.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throwaway81523 4y ago

That's not a moon, it's a space station.

ibreakphotos 4y ago

OP here again. I photoshopped one moon next to another (to see if one moon would get the AI treatment, while another would not), and managed to coax the AI to do exactly that. This is the image that I used, which contains 2 blurred moons: https://imgur.com/kMv1XAx https://imgur.com/kMv1XAx I replicated my original setup, shot the monitor from across the room, and got this: https://imgur.com/RSHAz1l https://imgur.com/RSHAz1l As you can see, one moon got the "AI enhancement", while the other one shows what was actually visible to the sensor - a blurry mess I think this settles it.

tagyro 4y ago

Samsung is a corrupt company with a corrupt culture. Starting from the top - bribery, embezzlement, illegal transactions, stock manipulation, perjury - all the way down to their "partners". They've been caught multiple times lying in their products description. I won't add links as there are too many, but a quick search for Samsung and the keywords I mentioned will bring many results. (let the downvoting begin)