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Night Sight for Pixel phones

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Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#71

Post by endorphone »

gst wrote: post #70
endorphone wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs. They added it with 2 and 3) and usually it is hidden behind an interface. Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use…

> Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs. Night Sight works perfectly fine on the Pixel 1. > Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review…

The very article linked notes that moving subjects like people turn into a blur. Of the various submarine stories about this, I've seen a single picture of a kid, and the kid is blurred (despite standing as still as they can).

Your Pixel 1 likely sets a ceiling on the exposure time. The results may be great to you, but I doubt they compare to a Pixel 3. And of course in all of these cases about these great photos, there are zero examples from any other devices. Just with and without on a Pixel device.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#72

Post by dgacmu »

endorphone wrote: post #68
dgacmu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but while you may be a photography fan, you don't know what you're talking about here. Stacking is quite the opposite of a "ghetto" version of a long exposure - it's the fundamental building block of being able to do the equivalent of a long exposure without its associated problems (motion blur from both camera and subject, high sensor noise if you turn up the gain, and over-saturating any bright spots). S…

"you don't know what you're talking about here" You literally repeated exactly what I said image stacking was, yet lead off by claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about. Classic. The goal of both is to achieve the exact same result -- more photons for a given pixel. Stacking is a necessary compromise under certain circumstances -- lack of sufficient stabilization, particularly noisy sensor or environment, etc…

Sorry, but no - stacking is as much about dynamic range adaptation as noise, and that's why I'm arguing against your terming it a "ghetto version of a long exposure". It's not. A long exposure has a fundamental problem with saturation, as well as noise. It's not just about lack of stabilization, there's also the motion of the subject. Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion - long exposures cannot. Computational approaches can do dynamic range adaptation to avoid blow-out due to CCD pixel saturation. Long exposures cannot.

If you read the slides from the Levoy talk I cited, you'll note that they explicitly choose to under-expose the individual exposures to minimize motion blur and blowout.

(Marc is now at Google continuing his work on computational photography, and his group contributes to many of the cool things you see on the Pixel series.)

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#73

Post by endorphone »

dgacmu wrote: post #72
endorphone wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you don't know what you're talking about here" You literally repeated exactly what I said image stacking was, yet lead off by claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about. Classic. The goal of both is to achieve the exact same result -- more photons for a given pixel. Stacking is a necessary compromise under certain circumstances -- lack of sufficient stabilization, particularly noisy sensor or environment, etc…

Sorry, but no - stacking is as much about dynamic range adaptation as noise, and that's why I'm arguing against your terming it a "ghetto version of a long exposure". It's not. A long exposure has a fundamental problem with saturation, as well as noise. It's not just about lack of stabilization, there's also the motion of the subject. Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion - long exposures cannot.…

"Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion"

But they don't. They don't in this example. Moving subjects are a blur. As an aside, of course stacked photo frames are underexposed because it wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

Computational photography can do interesting things and holds a tremendous amount of promise. However every single example that I can find of this mode -- across the many astroturfed pages -- show a longer exposure than what the stock app normally allows. And with that the requisite blurring of any moving subject.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#74

Post by chrisweekly »

derefr wrote: post #53
spiznnx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

I can't recall where I came across this idea but how about fridge shelves that (like mini moving sidewalks) slowly move food towards an edge to drop to a lower shelf and eventually to a composter or trash -- the idea being to put food items at a certain spot on a given shelf based on items' expiration date. Wildly impractical IRL, but clever enough to be memorable (for me anyway).

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#75

Post by modzu »

mediaman wrote: post #65
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…

I can see your point: this basically just looks like long exposures, or stacked exposures, which is basically the same thing of letting more photons hit the sensor, aligned using OIS. Any thoughts on why Apple, as the other leading phone maker with a heavy emphasis on camera quality, has not implemented anything like it? Not to discount the difficulty, but OIS aligned long exposures kind of seems like low hanging fru…

well to be fair google hasnt implemented it yet either. there could be significant reasons for that, like results could be worse than default except in specific situations

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#76

Post by hug »

endorphone wrote: post #73
dgacmu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but no - stacking is as much about dynamic range adaptation as noise, and that's why I'm arguing against your terming it a "ghetto version of a long exposure". It's not. A long exposure has a fundamental problem with saturation, as well as noise. It's not just about lack of stabilization, there's also the motion of the subject. Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion - long exposures cannot.…

"Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion" But they don't. They don't in this example. Moving subjects are a blur. As an aside, of course stacked photo frames are underexposed because it wouldn't make much sense otherwise. Computational photography can do interesting things and holds a tremendous amount of promise. However every single example that I can find of this mode -- across the many astrotur…

Are you arguing that EIS over a series of burst photos is incapable of making things better?

Everything I can see you saying -- much if it agreeable, like the fact that long-exposure OIS makes a lot of what this technology currently does possible without it -- is simply handwaving away the fact that EIS-over-burst with OIS can achieve things that OIS cannot by itself.

It seems to me that it's patently true that EIS has some benefits, and those benefits can be realised over the top of OIS.

There's obviously still a fair limit to OIS. I have somewhat shaky hands and even using something like Olympus' top range 5-axis IBIS, which is the best I've ever seen, I can still only shoot at 1/10". What can EIS do with a burst of 3x 1/20" exposures? Probably counter for my shaking a bit, at least. (If not for subject movement, yet.)

I simply do not see why you're discounting this so heavily.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#77

Post by kortex »

Johnny555 wrote: post #47
comboy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure the first step is taking many sharper short exposure shots (as opposed to longer exposures, which blur), then doing some tensor magic to stitch into a single image.

Object detection alone won't give you sharp text in low light. You need a minimum number of photons hitting pixels.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#78

Post by endorphone »

hug wrote: post #76
endorphone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Computational approaches can compensate for subject motion" But they don't. They don't in this example. Moving subjects are a blur. As an aside, of course stacked photo frames are underexposed because it wouldn't make much sense otherwise. Computational photography can do interesting things and holds a tremendous amount of promise. However every single example that I can find of this mode -- across the many astrotur…

Are you arguing that EIS over a series of burst photos is incapable of making things better? Everything I can see you saying -- much if it agreeable, like the fact that long-exposure OIS makes a lot of what this technology currently does possible without it -- is simply handwaving away the fact that EIS-over-burst with OIS can achieve things that OIS cannot by itself. It seems to me that it's patently true that EIS h…

Where did I discount EIS? EIS+OIS is a golden solution. It's what the Pixel 3 does. It's what the iPhone 8 does. It's what the Huawei P20 does.

This all gets very reductionist, but EIS over a series of bursts is a bad alternative to OIS. It will be garbage in->garbage out. EIS with OIS, however, gives you the benefits of OIS, with the safety valve and "time travelling" effect of EIS (in that it can correct where OIS made the wrong presumption, like the beginning of a pan).

>and even using something like Olympus' top range 5-axis IBIS

The ability of OIS to counter movement is a function of the focal length. Your Olympus probably has a 75mm equivalent or higher lens, where a small degree of movement is a large subject skew. That smartphone probably has a 26-28mm equivalent lens. Small degrees of movement are much more correctable.

EIS is brilliant. OIS is better for small movements, but add EIS and it's great. Computational photography is brilliant. However Google has really, really been pouring out the snake oil for their Pixel line.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#79

Post by cma »

bwang29 wrote: post #34

The biggest challenge to do this technically is to use gyroscope data to work together with the stacking algorithm. It's hard to tune the gyro to work great for any phone. A pure software solution to analyze the perspectives transformation would be too slow.

They probably have to have really well calibrated gyros for Daydream, with temperature calibration etc., unless the IMU/gyro is in the daydream holder itself.

Re: Night Sight for Pixel phones

#80

Post by PascLeRasc »

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.

Wow, what a cool guy. I know we don't do AMAs on here but it'd be amazing to get HN to pick his brains for a bit.
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