This weekend, a user on Reddit exposed what would be a false feature of cell phones. Samsung of high quality and its spectacular photos to the Moon.
According to the thread, the company misleads customers with the feature SpaceZoom 100X with which users can take photos of the star: actually, Samsung overlays textures taken from databases to enhance the image.
False propaganda or misleading the user?
The publication of ibreakphotos Give a simple example to demonstrate it.
On his monitor he opened an image of the Moon to which the resolution was lowered to the minimum, looking very blurry.
So with your Samsung galaxy S23opened the camera and used the SpaceZoom to take photos of this image, seeing how the phone applied a layer of textures and filters to show the details of the Moon that it was impossible for them to be seen in the example.
“samsung is using AI/ML (neural network trained on hundreds of images from the Moon) to retrieve/add the Moon texture to your moon images, and while some think that’s the camera’s capability, it’s not really.”
Report Samsung
The intention of the thread is to denounce Samsung for deceptive marketing.
An article is linked to the publication in which the company indicates that the SpaceZoom capture multiple frames in a matter of seconds and use artificial intelligence to fine-tune details.
“This is not about computational photography: it is about inserting images that simply do not exist,” the comments refer.
Samsung He has not responded to the accusation so far.
Image enrichment algorithms
Enhance the image of a camera is not a new issue. In fact, it is a useful tool that, based on image detection algorithms, configures a series of visual parameters that optimize the final result, something we call “post processing image” and that today includes everything from smartphones to cameras with interchangeable lenses.
However, the Samsung case brings us back one of the most important precedents in the industry. In April 2019, Huawei was in the middle of the controversy with the “Moon Mode” of its recent P30 Pro with 50X zoom and a novel periscopic imaging system, a system on which several Android models are currently based.
The controversy stems from the idea that a user is not capturing the beauty of the moon. Instead, according to the interpretation of various media, the user would be capturing a photo of the moon that is then slightly modified with artificial elements to make it look like they captured a beautiful photo of our satellite.
At the time, Huawei defended itself by noting that “Moon Mode works on the same principle as other AI master modes, in that it recognizes and optimizes details within an image to help people take better photos. It in no way replaces the image; that would require an unrealistic amount of storage space, since AI mode recognizes more than 1,300 scenarios. Based on machine learning principles, the camera recognizes a scene and helps optimize focus and exposure to enhance details such as shapes, colors, and highlights and lowlights. This feature can be easily turned on or off while taking a photo. While there is a Moon Mode, you can still take the photo without AI mode because of the periscope lens.
