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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

#341
post #31

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.

This came up big time with the Rittenhouse trial when the judge didn't want to use the pinch to zoom method on video of the event. A lot of people laughed because he talked about AI but he was on the right path, it does inject pixels to scale the image.

No. He wasn't on the right path because he was talking about the wrong thing.

It astounds me how people are so quickly conflating multiple different scenarios.

Playback and capture are very different things. Would you be accepting people complaining about log4j vulnerabilities with regards to a C++ code base for example? No, because you'd know the nuanced difference that's inherent in a code base. Image processing is the same. It's not just all one catch all Boogeyman

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to just 'enhance' an image to make a license plate readable. Well, a phone can reconstruct this license plate, and in fact any license plate in lieu of this one! And invent a new one! Which is worrisome for justice. Presenting proof, that was uploaded to servers, horodated and geostamped, won’t be enough in a court of law. Anyone can answer: “What if the iPhone recreated and inferred the presence of…

> This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned? Deepfakes, robocalls and Caller ID and voice impersonation, automatic ML in photos, if this train keeps going, we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function.

You will need a transcript of processing and intermediate results.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This face, is it real? The distance, is it repositionned? Deepfakes, robocalls and Caller ID and voice impersonation, automatic ML in photos, if this train keeps going, we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function.

> we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a passing phase, before returning to normality.

the difference is, before media, everyone understood that if they didn't experience something directly, they had to trust someone who spoke, and that speech was always understood to be an interpretation and possibly fiction.

but now we have all these artificial experiences that might clock real to the senses and have a reputation of fidelity, yet have always been editable and are increasingly made of black box constructive interpretations that value who-knows-what over fidelity. and no part of the process can be interrogated for motivations or detail.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power. DSLR and mirrorless cameras have better optical properties. But they are held back by starting too late and being much worse when it comes to software. These cameras also are limited by their CPUs, which are a decade behind, and by their batteries, which are much smaller but expected…

> It's important to note that recent iPhones contain the same M1 chip as last year's MacBooks. They are not limited by processing power. Correct me if I'm wrong but there's still a huge issue with silicon processing capabilities/power when it comes to image sensors (which is why camera sensors buffer images between shots). I unfortunately don't remember the context but it said something that it was (very far) from po…

This isn’t true, really: there are massive amounts of data being pushed about in a modern camera, through custom image pipelines that will do many gigabytes per second of throughout, but none of those are really bottlenecks for the sensor data per se.

Most of it ends up in a RAM-like write buffer, because SD cards, or even faster formats like CF-express, can’t keep up with the write speed of tens of 50 megapixel shots coming through every second.

There are sensor readout speed limits, which is why you don’t see cameras exceed 30 frames per second of 8k recording, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t read out the entire full-well capacity of the sensor each of those frames.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have the same heatsink on all three, and not necessarily the same number of cores.

This. My Corsair H150i Pro AIO water cooler and decent airflow case (Define 7 W/Corsair ML140s) allows me to run my Ryzen 3900XT at 4.4ghz constantly, all cores, for any kind of real life workload. Good luck trying that with a laptop.

The M1-Max at 30W seems to have tge same Geekbench 5 multicore benchmark score as the Ryzen 3900XT at 105W. Think about that. Also a better single core score. You won't be using all cores all the time.

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

#346
post #269
post #9

"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.

Any technically savvy person should be able to differentiate different types of upscaling algorithms. The judge was arguing about enlarging an already recorded video, not about the merits of the original recording. This post is about image processing during the capture process. Conflating them is disingenuous, unless we're taking very large leaps of logic

I don't think they're that different. In both cases the frame is already taken and the editing takes place milliseconds after or months after.

Apple could make iPhones work like DSLRs and save both the edited image and the RAW sensor capture.

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

#347

Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a t…

But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software processing later if you can see it has done something silly, right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified" image data.

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

#348
I had a problem where letting iPhones automatically touch up portraits taken on a dedicated camera would result in black blobs being inserted over the whites of the subject's eyes. That's just to say that these problems are common and to watch out for it on your own photos. When you know it can happen in subtle ways you'll pay more attention and you'll start to see big errors in images you thought were fine at first glance.

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

#349
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any technically savvy person should be able to differentiate different types of upscaling algorithms. The judge was arguing about enlarging an already recorded video, not about the merits of the original recording. This post is about image processing during the capture process. Conflating them is disingenuous, unless we're taking very large leaps of logic

I don't think they're that different. In both cases the frame is already taken and the editing takes place milliseconds after or months after. Apple could make iPhones work like DSLRs and save both the edited image and the RAW sensor capture.

No they're radically different in effect.

One is the playback of data, the other is the capture of real world signals into data. They may use technologies in the same domains, but the implementation varies dramatically, as do the possibilities..

If you have the recorded data, you can send it to any trusted playback device/software to get back a trusted scaling. You can workaround/bypass any distrust in a given players algorithms, and it's very easily discoverable whether something is applying processing or not. There's still the risk of intentionally faked videos, but the discussion is around real time processing introducing artifacts.

With image capture though, there's no such thing as "truth". Even RAW data isn't truth. It's just less processing, but you can't escape it altogether. Even professional full frame cameras will do significant signal processing between the photosites and the recorded RAW image. The same goes for film.

The only thing a court can do is put a strong guidelines for proving the honesty of the content. you can't disallow processed imagery because all images are processed the second they're recorded.

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

#350

Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a t…

But it would be nice to be able to re-run that software processing later if you can see it has done something silly, right? That at least seems like a valid use for "unmodified" image data.

I believe the Google Camera does this. Not sure if it preserves the original photo before any color corrections, but it allows me to go back and added, remove or change any blur.
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