How Artificial Intelligence is changing photography

“If you’re wondering how good your next phone’s camera is going to be, it’d be wise to pay attention to what the manufacturer has to say about AI,” Sam Byford reports for The Verge. “Beyond the hype and bluster, the technology has enabled staggering advances in photography over the past couple of years, and there’s no reason to think that progress will slow down.”
“The most impressive recent advancements in photography have taken place at the software and silicon level rather than the sensor or lens — and that’s largely thanks to AI giving cameras a better understanding of what they’re looking at,” Byford reports. “Apple makes use of this tech to drive its dual-camera phones’ portrait mode. The iPhone’s image signal processor uses machine learning techniques to recognize people with one camera, while the second camera creates a depth map to help isolate the subject and blur the background. The ability to recognize people through machine learning wasn’t new when this feature debuted in 2016, as it’s what photo organization software was already doing. But to manage it in real time at the speed required for a smartphone camera was a breakthrough.”
“Image signal processors have been important to phone camera performance for a while, but it looks likely that NPUs will take on a larger role as computational photography advances,” Byford reports. “Huawei was the first company to announce a system-on-chip with dedicated AI hardware, the Kirin 970, although Apple’s A11 Bionic ended up reaching consumers first.”
MacDailyNews Take: You know you’re reaching when you have to excruciatingly construct a sentence to credit a company with announcing something before Apple actually delivered it to users. For that matter, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer debuted the HP Slate tablet computer during CES 2010 on January 6, 2010, although Apple’s iPad “ended up reaching consumers first” on April 3, 2010. The HP Slate finally arrived in October 2010, after HP got to see the iPad. Suffice to say, the HP Slate was not a hit.

“The latest Apple A12 Bionic, meanwhile, has an eight-core neural engine that can run tasks in Core ML, Apple’s machine learning framework, up to nine times faster than the A11, and for the first time it’s directly linked to the image processor. Apple says this gives the camera a better understanding of the focal plane, for example, helping generate more realistic depth of field,” Byford reports. “Even at this early stage of computational photography, there are real benefits to be found from phone cameras that have been designed around machine learning.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s SoCs and neural engines are light years ahead of the competition. We’d like to see Apple’s camera team use what Apple’s silicon team is providing them to its fullest.
Apple should not be outpaced by any other smartphone maker in low light photography or any other facet of photography. Period. When they are so obviously outclassed, Apple’s camera team should be ashamed and they should make damn sure it never happens again.

Night Sight on Google Pixel3 — pretty much speaks for itself