This weekend, a user on Reddit put the spotlight on what would be a bogus cell phone feature Samsung and its spectacular photos at the highest level Moon.
According to the thread, the company misleads customers with the function. Space Zoom 100X with which users can take pictures of the star: in reality, Samsung Overlays textures taken from databases to enhance the image.
False advertising or user deception?
The publication of ibreakphotos gives a simple example to demonstrate this.
On his monitor he opened an image of the Moon to which he lowered the resolution to the minimum, making it look very blurry.
Then, with his Samsung Galaxy S23opened the camera and used the Space Zoom to take photos of this image, seeing how the cell phone applied a layer of textures and filters to show the details of the Moon that it was impossible for them to be seen in the example.
“Samsung is using AI/ML (neural network trained on hundreds of images of the Moon) to recover/add the texture of the Moon in your moon images, and although some think that is the capability of the camera, it really isn’t,” he adds in his commentary.
Samsung Complaint
The intention of the thread is to denounce Samsung for misleading marketing.
The publication is linked to an article in which the company points out that the Space Zoom captures multiple frames in a matter of seconds and uses artificial intelligence to fine-tune details.
“It’s not about computational photography: it’s about inserting images that simply don’t exist,” refer comments.
Samsung has not responded to the allegation at this time.
Image enriching algorithms.
Boosting a camera’s image is not a new issue. In fact, it is a useful tool that, based on image detection algorithms, configures a series of visual parameters that optimize the final result, something we call “post processing image” and that today is integrated from smartphones to cameras with interchangeable lenses.
However, the Samsung case brings back one of the most important precedents in the industry. In April 2019, Huawei was in the middle of controversy with the “Moon Mode” of its recent P30 Pro with 50X zoom and a novel periscopic imaging system, a system on which several Android models are based today.
The controversy stems from the idea that a user is not capturing the beauty of the moon. Instead, according to the interpretation of several media, the user would be capturing a photo of the moon that is then slightly modified with artificial elements to make it look like he captured a beautiful photo of our satellite.
At the time, Huawei defended itself by pointing out that “Moon Mode works on the same principle as other AI master modes, in that it recognizes and optimizes details within an image to help people take better photos. In no way does it replace the image; that would require an unrealistic amount of storage space, as AI mode recognizes more than 1300 scenarios. Based on machine learning principles, the camera recognizes a scenario and helps optimize focus and exposure to enhance details such as shapes, colors, and highlights and lowlights. This feature can be easily turned on or off while taking a photo. While there is a Moon Mode, you can still take the photo without the AI mode due to the periscope lens.”
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