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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

#51
post #13

I wouldn‘t completely exclude the possibility that a random bit flip caused the ML processing to go haywire.

The probability of a bit flip enabling the leaf-replacer logic instead of causing a weird heisenbug and just crashing the camera app is astronomically low.

Just crashing the camera app won’t end up on Twitter and HN though.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#52

I 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.

I don't know if digital camera emulation is a thing, but this thread is making me thirsty for a way to emulate my old 2MP Olympus.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#53

I 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.

Very much agree. I took RAW pictures with my Nikon on a christmas party, and even took the time to properly develop and adjust them.

Still, people complained on how "old and bad" their faces looked (in pretty normal pics, nothing fancy). I attribute this to the fact that everybody is now used to phones completely editing faces and smoothing skin and adding saturation, etc., which makes us more "instagramable" although less human.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#54

Maybe iPhones are now making aesthetic decisions? "No, that person's face... Well, let's just cover it with a leaf." It puts the censorship of Renaissance paintings & statues with figleafs over the naughty bits in a new perspective.

Yes they have been doing aesthetic decisions since a while.

What started out with "simple" image stabilizations, noise filtering etc. has long become a pipeline of "apply AI magic onto the image which makes it how people think it should look" (instead of how it actually looks).

Like making the sky much more bluer then it is.

Or edges much sharper then anything such a camera could see (or sometimes especially in combination with digital zoom anything a human with sharp healthy eyes could see).

And in case of image stabilization one thing you tend to turn is to take multiple pictures in a row and interpolate. Like some pictures with leafs "besides" the head and some with them behind the head. And then "magic" the head becomes the leaf.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#55

The 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 optica…

Oflow "glitches" are some of the most fun things in image processing, and definitely my favorite render glitches. When it works, it's amazing. When it doesn't, it's also just as amazing, but in a different manner.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#57
post #37

I 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. Wo…

Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#58
post #13

I wouldn‘t completely exclude the possibility that a random bit flip caused the ML processing to go haywire.

The probability of a bit flip enabling the leaf-replacer logic instead of causing a weird heisenbug and just crashing the camera app is astronomically low.

Yeah but how many iPhone pictures are taken every day?

I'm not saying I'm convinced, but even something with 1/1,000,000,000 odds isn't really out of the question for an action that must happen at least millions of times a day.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#59

This gives me the same feeling as those ML-powered “enhanced zoom” features: where does the photograph end and the machine made-up fantasy start?

Obligatory Red Dwarf reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo

Take my upvote. This has been posted to HN before but I love seeing it again. Red Dwarf was truly an amazing show way ahead of its time imo. For those who have never heard of it, it is a space based comedy I would recommend to all.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#60

This gives me the same feeling as those ML-powered “enhanced zoom” features: where does the photograph end and the machine made-up fantasy start?

Obligatory Red Dwarf reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tIDad3xxs

I love these guys so much

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