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Night Sight for Pixel phones

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Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#51

Post by endorphone »

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery.

Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures.

What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer exposures than normal (note the smooth motion blur of moving objects, which is nothing more than a long exposure), and then doing noise removal. There are zero camera makers who are flipping their desks over this. It is usually a "pro" hidden feature because in the real world subjects move during long exposure and shooters are just unhappy with the result.

The contrived hype around the Pixel's "computational photography" (which seems more incredible in theory than in the actual world) has reached an absurd level, and the astroturfing is just absurd.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#52

Post by derefr »

Mahn wrote: post #7
londons_explore wrote: post #4

I would like super sensitive cameras like this to be used inside fridges to see the very faint glow of food going off. Chemical reactions by bacteria breaking down food produce light, enough for humans to see in only the darkest of places (if you live in a city, you won't ever encounter dark enough situations). A camera simulating a 1 hour exposure time in a closed refrigerator ought to be able to see it pretty easil…

I never knew I wanted a "smart" fridge, but a fridge that can detect food going off sounds incredible. Sign me up if this is feasible.

A fridge that prevents food going off would be better, no? That wouldn't require smarts, just replacing the air with pure nitrogen, like modern grain silos do. Doing it at "consumer scale" would probably only require the same sort of compressor that your fridge already uses for its cooling.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#53

Post by derefr »

spiznnx wrote: post #40
kraftman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rfid tag everything and add a scale so that your fridge can tell when you're out of items or low on milk! Would potentially make recycling easier too

I used to help teach a undergraduate senior design course, and the number of students who want to do exactly this is staggering. I don't know if its really that bad of an idea, but we didn't allow projects that had been done before so they were all rejected.

Really, you can predict goods spoilage just given how old stuff is. You don't need a smart fridge; you just need an ETL pipeline from a ScanSnap (reading in your grocery-store receipts) to an inventory tracker app. You've got "smarts", but they're not in the fridge.

(And in the end, that's better: an inventory-tracker app that's on your phone is able to tell you to throw stuff out without you needing to own a "smart-home hub" or configure your fridge to connect to your wi-fi; and, unlike the fridge, its notifications will probably keep working even if its manufacturer goes out of business.)

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#54

Post by [deleted] »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

[deleted]

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#55

Post by trhway »

yorwba wrote: post #9
londons_explore wrote: post #2

Prior work at Google Research before it made it into the product: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-pho... And by the original researcher in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lbnMd56Ys

There's also this set of slides on the technology behind SeeInTheDark: http://graphics.stanford.edu/talks/seeinthedark-public-15sep...

multiple frames approach sounds similar to Hubble telescope approach.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#56

Post by joshschreuder »

jakobegger wrote: post #35

All those shots look amazing, but they're of stationary objects. I really want to know how that works for people! 99% of photos I take are of people, and the lighting is always bad. Are there any photos of people?

There's a photo of the author in the article.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#57

Post by nkurz »

somebodynew wrote: post #38
yorwba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading between the lines of [1], bioluminescence is used to detect bacteria/fungi/other organisms in food, but only by adding luciferase to a sample and measuring the light emitted when luciferase reacts with ATP. Because living organisms contain ATP, the ATP content can be used as a proxy for contamination by microorganisms. But I didn't find anything on bioluminescence occurring naturally in the kinds of bacteria…

Rotting meat definitely glows. I've personally seen decaying mammal carcasses glowing in the woods at night (always either green like foxfire or an odd almost monochromatic cyan that must really stimulate the eye's rod cells). It's very faint and would be difficult to notice without trees to shield it from moonlight. A camera could pick it up with a long exposure.

Thanks, I hadn't known about this effect. Apparently it's been known for a long time. In the 1600's, Robert Boyle claimed to have been able to read an issue of The Philosophical Transactions by the light of a rotting Neck of Veal: https://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/boyle-and-biolumin...

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#58

Post by vibrolax »

nkoren wrote: post #49
combatentropy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's great news. I came into contact with your father's work with vacuum tube audio. I always admired his solid engineering approach without mysticism.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#59

Post by windexh8er »

endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

While I'd like to believe pulling off these levels of photos is as easy as you proclaim (because I would have a lot of old shots that are usable) the level of discounting you assert here is unfortunate, because it's simply not true. The proof is in the reality that nothing has done this good of a job to date. If you do have examples that match or exceed please share and I will be in line to buy.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#60

Post by endorphone »

windexh8er wrote: post #59
endorphone wrote: post #51

Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery. Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures. What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer ex…

While I'd like to believe pulling off these levels of photos is as easy as you proclaim (because I would have a lot of old shots that are usable) the level of discounting you assert here is unfortunate, because it's simply not true. The proof is in the reality that nothing has done this good of a job to date. If you do have examples that match or exceed please share and I will be in line to buy.

Just to be clear, I've been a serious photographer (amateur, not professional, but with all of the gear) for two decades, and actually made a pretty popular computational photography app for Android.

I honestly don't know which part you're doubting. Long exposures? Do you doubt that other cameras can do long exposures? Do you doubt that they can do noise reduction? Do you doubt that OIS allows for hand-held long exposures, especially on wide-angle lenses? What are you doubting, because these are all trivial things that you can validate yourself.

As to examples, you're wide-eyed taking a puff piece with some absolutely banal examples and exaggerated descriptions -- and zero comparable photos from other devices -- by someone who apparently knows very little about photography. How should I counter that? I can find millions of night streetscape photos that absolutely blow away the examples given.

Generally if you're going to pander to a manufacturer, you at least talk about things like lux. In this case it's just "look, between this setting and that setting it's different, therefore no one else can do it".

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