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Night Sight for Pixel phones

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41–50 of 137 posts

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#41
post #17

> Google says that its machine learning detects what objects are in the frame, and the camera is smart enough to know what color they are supposed to have. That is absolutely impressive. The color and text on the fire extinguishers along with the texture detail seen in the headphones in the last picture are just stunning. Congratulations to anyone who worked on this project!

It's impressive, but it also means that your camera isn't always going to capture what's there -- it'll capture what it guesses was there. I wonder how easily it is fooled to capture something that's not there?

I think it's taking as many pictures as possible and using very slightly different angle to get as good resolution as possible with as little noise as possible (I have no idea if that's really what's happening here)

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#42

Wouldn't video still be extremely blurry? This is mostly for things not moving / pictures I wonder if this technology will eventually supercede military night vision goggles. Having the ability to add color perception at long distances could have useful for identifying things at night.

you are right that this would be useless in its current state for video. But if it ever got smart enough to start stacking images on a 3d model of the world you could do some incredible stuff.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#43
How are you going to do a review of Night Sight and not even go outside? Every photo just taken in a room with the lights turned off. Come on, man. Tell your editor he needs to wait until nightfall.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#44
post #43

How are you going to do a review of Night Sight and not even go outside? Every photo just taken in a room with the lights turned off. Come on, man. Tell your editor he needs to wait until nightfall.

Huh? There are a bunch in the second half of the article.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#45
post #18

If you're interested in learning more about this stuff the head of the Pixel team (Marc Levoy - Prof emeritus at Stanford) has an entire lecture series on this stuff from a class he ran at Google. They are here along with lecture notes: https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home What's really cool is you can see him talk about a lot of these ideas well before they made it into the Pixel phone

If you're thinking of taking a look, I particularly enjoyed Lecture 7 of this series. The practical applications of Fourier analysis in image recognition/filtering/processing are really quite amazing.

Plus, if you're at all curious about the technical details for how exactly something like Night Sight is implemented on the Pixel, understanding what Fourier transformations are and how they are utilized is vital.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#46
This reminds me of a similar project: "Learning to See in the Dark". They used a fully-convolutional network trained on short-exposure night-time images and corresponding long-exposure reference images. Their results look quite similar to the Pixel photos.

http://cchen156.web.engr.illinois.edu/SID.html

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive, but it also means that your camera isn't always going to capture what's there -- it'll capture what it guesses was there. I wonder how easily it is fooled to capture something that's not there?

I think it's taking as many pictures as possible and using very slightly different angle to get as good resolution as possible with as little noise as possible (I have no idea if that's really what's happening here)

That's not what this article says, do you have reason to believe it's incorrect? The quote about object detection in the parent post came from the article.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#48
post #44
post #43

How are you going to do a review of Night Sight and not even go outside? Every photo just taken in a room with the lights turned off. Come on, man. Tell your editor he needs to wait until nightfall.

Huh? There are a bunch in the second half of the article.

Ah. An update was posted literally in the last ten minutes. This article came out yesterday (when I first saw it)

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#49
post #31

What the Pixel cameras are doing is staggeringly good. My father is the founder of https://www.imatest.com/ , and has a substantial collection of top-end cameras. He's probably in the top 0.0001% of image quality nerds. But most of the time, he's now entirely happy shooting on his Pixel.

I enjoyed some of the articles on your father's other website, like http://www.normankoren.com/digital_tonality.html , and hope he keeps it running.

Yeah he's a good egg. I'm sure it'll keep going as long as he does. His startup actually grew out of those articles -- which were basically supposed to be his retirement hobby -- and now it employs 20 people! I'm really proud of what he's accomplished.
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