3 ms·

I don't spend too much time thinking about cameras or lenses but this kind of conversation makes me wonder... when I take photos of receipts or street signs or

by mcny 1y ago

I don't spend too much time thinking about cameras or lenses but this kind of conversation makes me wonder... when I take photos of receipts or street signs or just text in general, is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text? or am I being paranoid?

sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
It's definitely a possibility if there's a point where LLM-based OCR is applied. See https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr and its related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958
- thesuitonym 1y ago
  Like almost everything LLMs do, you don't need an LLM to make these mistakes.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
    LLM-based OCR and speech transcription do come with a failure condition that is different than you see in pre-LLM solutions. When the source data is hard to understand, LLMs try to fill the gap with something that makes sense given the surrounding context. Pre-LLM approaches handle unintelligible source data differently. You'll more commonly see nonsense output for the unintelligible bits. In some cases the tool might be capable of recognizing low confidence and returning an error or other indicator of a possible miss. IMO, that's a feature. The LLM approach makes up something that looks right but may not actually match the source data. These errors are far harder to detect and more likely to make it past human review. The LLM approach does mean that you can often get a more "complete" output from a low quality data source vs pre-LLM approaches. And sometimes it might even be correct! But it will get it wrong other times. Another failure condition I've experienced with LLM-based voice transcription that I didn't have pre-LLM - running down the wrong fork in the road. Sometimes the LLM approaches will get a word or two wrong...words with similar phonetics or multiple meanings, that kind of thing. It may then continue down the path this mistaken context has created, outputting additional words that do not align to the source data at all.
rasalas 1y ago
Xerox scanners/photocopiers had this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815
- Aachen 1y ago
  It was the compression format, not the scanner, right? Same would have happened if you store in that format (with the same quality settings etc.) on a computer or smartphone Not that that helps anyone who's affected, but that situation is more like if you'd have an .aip file, AI Photo storage format, where it invents details when you zoom in, and not a sensor (pipeline) issue
  - namibj 1y ago
    No they exhibited it in pure instant single copy copying mode.
    - Aachen 1y ago
      Oh wtf! I had ctrl+f'd the article for cop (to catch "copy" and "copies" and such) to quickly check this but didn't see that. Then I guess I don't remember the root cause of this issue
      - namibj 1y ago
        Apparently you were right, mostly. Though it was later determined to be independent of quality setting; the vendor had claimed after the initial findings and having had a lot of time to try and internally reproduce "that factory default settings would be unaffected". I, probably due to phrasing ambiguity in an old TheRegister article on the matter, had mistakenly remembered the temporary storage between scan and print of the copy mode to also had been affected. As there were many situations where one would scan and destroy the original once offsite backup has run, while physical copies would/should often not entail destruction of the original, most of the overall damage/impact would be due to scanning anyways, not copying.
matrss 1y ago
Worse, Xerox scanners specifically meant for digitizing documents have changed text for a long time. The compression algorithm they used (I think even in the default settings) sometimes replaced e.g. 6 with 8, and similar things. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 (german, but there should be news articles from back then in english as well, somewhere)
- gruez 1y ago
  That's not really "computation photography" in any meaningful sense, closer to "digital processing". It's not impossible for such glitches to occur with modern smartphone cameras, but it's implausible. I don't think there's ever a confirmed instance of such a gaff happening. Meanwhile a few years ago there was a photo with a misplaced leaf that made the rounds, and people were complaining about how it was caused by computational photography, but it turned out the photo was accurate. The leaf actually there.
  - matrss 1y ago
    My point was that you don't have to take a photo of a receipt to run into this issue, actual machines specifically build to digitize receipts and other documents already made this kind of mistake. No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
coredog64 1y ago
Having uploaded my share of receipts to Concur, there's 2 checks & balances: If you still have the original, then you can correct the OCR'd value. And then Concur will recognized both line items and totals and whine if they don't match.
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
iPhones can definitely garble text, although it's not clear whether they can substitute some text for another. Seems possible but unlikely (in a purely statistical sense). https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_garbling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_ga... https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_pro_max_bad_post_processing_for_photos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_p... https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_non_pro_10x_shots_bring_unreadable_text/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_n...
jlokier 1y ago
> is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text? Yes it is. I've seen that happen in real-time with the built-in camera viewfinder (not even taking a photo) on my mid-range Samsung phone, when I zoomed in on a sign. It only changed one letter, and it was more like a strange optical warping from one letter to a different one when I pointed the camera at a particular sign in a shop, but it was very surprising to see.

by mcny 1y ago

sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago

It's definitely a possibility if there's a point where LLM-based OCR is applied. See https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr https://www.runpulse.com/blog/why-llms-suck-at-ocr and its related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42966958

thesuitonym 1y ago
Like almost everything LLMs do, you don't need an LLM to make these mistakes.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
  LLM-based OCR and speech transcription do come with a failure condition that is different than you see in pre-LLM solutions. When the source data is hard to understand, LLMs try to fill the gap with something that makes sense given the surrounding context. Pre-LLM approaches handle unintelligible source data differently. You'll more commonly see nonsense output for the unintelligible bits. In some cases the tool might be capable of recognizing low confidence and returning an error or other indicator of a possible miss. IMO, that's a feature. The LLM approach makes up something that looks right but may not actually match the source data. These errors are far harder to detect and more likely to make it past human review. The LLM approach does mean that you can often get a more "complete" output from a low quality data source vs pre-LLM approaches. And sometimes it might even be correct! But it will get it wrong other times. Another failure condition I've experienced with LLM-based voice transcription that I didn't have pre-LLM - running down the wrong fork in the road. Sometimes the LLM approaches will get a word or two wrong...words with similar phonetics or multiple meanings, that kind of thing. It may then continue down the path this mistaken context has created, outputting additional words that do not align to the source data at all.

rasalas 1y ago

Xerox scanners/photocopiers had this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815

Aachen 1y ago
It was the compression format, not the scanner, right? Same would have happened if you store in that format (with the same quality settings etc.) on a computer or smartphone Not that that helps anyone who's affected, but that situation is more like if you'd have an .aip file, AI Photo storage format, where it invents details when you zoom in, and not a sensor (pipeline) issue
- namibj 1y ago
  No they exhibited it in pure instant single copy copying mode.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    Oh wtf! I had ctrl+f'd the article for cop (to catch "copy" and "copies" and such) to quickly check this but didn't see that. Then I guess I don't remember the root cause of this issue
    - namibj 1y ago
      Apparently you were right, mostly. Though it was later determined to be independent of quality setting; the vendor had claimed after the initial findings and having had a lot of time to try and internally reproduce "that factory default settings would be unaffected". I, probably due to phrasing ambiguity in an old TheRegister article on the matter, had mistakenly remembered the temporary storage between scan and print of the copy mode to also had been affected. As there were many situations where one would scan and destroy the original once offsite backup has run, while physical copies would/should often not entail destruction of the original, most of the overall damage/impact would be due to scanning anyways, not copying.

matrss 1y ago

Worse, Xerox scanners specifically meant for digitizing documents have changed text for a long time. The compression algorithm they used (I think even in the default settings) sometimes replaced e.g. 6 with 8, and similar things. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 (german, but there should be news articles from back then in english as well, somewhere)

gruez 1y ago
That's not really "computation photography" in any meaningful sense, closer to "digital processing". It's not impossible for such glitches to occur with modern smartphone cameras, but it's implausible. I don't think there's ever a confirmed instance of such a gaff happening. Meanwhile a few years ago there was a photo with a misplaced leaf that made the rounds, and people were complaining about how it was caused by computational photography, but it turned out the photo was accurate. The leaf actually there.
- matrss 1y ago
  My point was that you don't have to take a photo of a receipt to run into this issue, actual machines specifically build to digitize receipts and other documents already made this kind of mistake. No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

coredog64 1y ago

Having uploaded my share of receipts to Concur, there's 2 checks & balances: If you still have the original, then you can correct the OCR'd value. And then Concur will recognized both line items and totals and whine if they don't match.

bobbylarrybobby 1y ago

iPhones can definitely garble text, although it's not clear whether they can substitute some text for another. Seems possible but unlikely (in a purely statistical sense). https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_garbling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1m5zsj7/ai_photo_ga... https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_pro_max_bad_post_processing_for_photos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jbcl1l/iphone_16_p... https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_non_pro_10x_shots_bring_unreadable_text/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/17bxcm8/iphone_15_n...

jlokier 1y ago

> is it possible that at some point the computational photography makes a mistake and changes text? Yes it is. I've seen that happen in real-time with the built-in camera viewfinder (not even taking a photo) on my mid-range Samsung phone, when I zoomed in on a sign. It only changed one letter, and it was more like a strange optical warping from one letter to a different one when I pointed the camera at a particular sign in a shop, but it was very surprising to see.