I wonder if this has any implications over iPhone (or cellphones in general) photos in court.
This might be brought up to overturn any photo evidence from phones.
iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
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Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not really
Yes, yes really. When real resolution is being substituted with the best guess of a completely closed source image processor, the court should be made aware of it.
This sounds like a weird rationalization for an absurd case of technical ignorance. Like when people defended nuking hurricanes or using UV lights as a Covid therapy.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#33The cause of this is image-stacking.
The phone takes ~20 frames, over 0.2 seconds. In that time, lots of people and things in the frame move.
Optical flow is used to track all moving parts of the image, and then 'undo' any movement, aligning all parts of the image.
Then the frames are combined, usually by, for each pixel, taking something like the median or throwing out outliers and using the average.
When the optical flow fails to track an object in more than half the frames, the 'outliers' that are thrown out can in fact be the image content you wanted.
It happens with leaves a lot because they can flutter fast from one frame to the next, so tracking each individual leaf is hard. A few bad tracking results on more than half the frames, and all you end up seeing is leaves where there should be a face..
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#34[deleted]
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#35how do we exclude the possibility that we are just seeing a leaf on its way falling (or blowing) between the subject that the photographer?
Logically an event like that would be followed by the iphone not detecting a face, and therefore not applying its usual face-related black-box features?
Supposing this is the case and is 'bad', what exactly do we expect 'better behaviour' would mean in this situation?
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#36I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep selling new versions of their product.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#37I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people are not after accuracy.
IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the thing we are used to. Wouldn't have caused a confusion if they used some other word instead of photograph.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#38I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us.
I similarly have mixed feelings about what I've seen lately of the deep learning that 'restores' very old images to incredible quality. But that quality is fake. I'm sure there's a tug at the heartstrings to see a crisp image of your deceased father from his high school days, but to me that seems a bit revisionist. I don't know. I guess I'm just uneasy with the idea of us editing our lives so readily.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#39"Cameras" making changes to the image like this make the discussion about the image processing pipeline during the Rittenhouse trial seem a little less bizarre.
It wasn't really bizarre in the grand scheme of things, but it was a bit of a reach in the context it was questioned in.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#40I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.