
DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Network - sandGorgon
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/
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imfromit
I think labelling this as "DSLR quality images" is highly misleading. It's
another interesting image enhancement technique, this time using DCNs to
further predict what information isn't present or is incorrect.

However as the article says camera phones are fundamentally limited by the
size of the lens and sensors, so they can never gather the same amount of
information that a larger DSLR camera can. They simply can't gather the same
detail and although we can get better at being able to predict detail in some
cases it surely can't ever be same as having that information in the first
place.

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dang
Ok, we've replaced 'DSLR' in the title above.

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sandGorgon
I'm not completely sure i agree with this decision. You have editorialized the
author's own paper title that went to a peer reviewed conference.

One may disagree with the results. But your change will not match for a
straight up search for the paper title, which I think is a disservice.

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dang
Peer-reviewed paper titles are not immune to clickbait, alas. But ok, we'll
put that bit back.

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nayuki
From the sample images, all I can see is that the "DSLR"-ized images look
brighter and have subtly more pleasing colors. But is that all to it? Am I
missing the big picture?

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maxxxxx
I agree. It looks like something you could do quickly in Lightroom. Raise the
shadows, lower the highlights, set white balance. Maybe you could use the same
algorithm for DSLR RAW pictures and then get real DSLR quality?

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bcraven
I believe the whole point of this method is it automatically chooses /how far/
to move those sliders to get closest to the result you'd expect.

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bicubic
> The images were captured in automatic mode, we used default settings for all
> cameras throughout the whole collection procedure.

I guess while that technically makes the images 'dslr quality', that's not how
dslr cameras are generally used. Shooting in auto and doing no post
processing, will never yield the results you see with even amateur dslr
photography.

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nevir
Consider a future where you don't have to configure your camera _before_
shooting, and instead do all the configuration _after_

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bdamm
For people who view camera settings as an inconvenience, then yes that sounds
like an attractive thing. When using a camera as a tool, a photographer
sometimes wants complete control over the capturing process. Some things you
don't get to change later no matter what algorithms are involved, such as the
balance between noise and exposure time.

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chii
If the camera had hardware light metre, then recorded the ambient light level
as well, then wouldn't it be more powerful to be able to make full exposure
adjustments after the fact?

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zaarn
No because the act of taking the photo freezes the exposure settings due to
how photos work.

I've played a bit with astronomical photography and the amount of work to
getting the signal in the picture good enough without introducing noise is
quite high. (Going as far as taking pictures with the lens on the telescope to
capture the natural sensor noise, which is usually good for about a few hours
of use)

However, you don't get second tries on a computer. If your signal is too weak
or the noise is too strong, the picture is ruined, no amount of editing will
fix that.

The only solution I'd see for that is to take multiple images at once with
different sensors, each using a different exposure. But that still doesn't
provide a sliding scale, only a stair function of "is this close enough"?

The better solution is to take a proper light meter and properly setup the
camera in the first place.

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citrin_ru
Or you can shot a several shots with different exposure simultaneously (see e.
g. Light L16). It may not work for an astronomy but should work in many other
cases.

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zaarn
That's not really a solution, especially because that requires a lens per
exposure setting (you can't expose a sensor with different settings at the
same time, that's basic physics). So any number of exposure levels over 2 is
going to be a huge problem.

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sandGorgon
The most interesting part of the paper is this

 _DPED: DSLR Photo Enhancement Dataset

To tackle the general photo enhancement problem by mapping low-quality phone
photos into photos captured by a professional DSLR camera, we introduce a
large-scale DPED dataset that consists of photos taken synchronously in the
wild by three smartphones and one DSLR camera. The devices used to collect the
data are iPhone 3GS, BlackBerry Passport, Sony Xperia Z and Canon 70D DSLR. To
ensure that all devices were capturing photos simultaneously, they were
mounted on a tripod and activated remotely by a wireless control system_

It opens up the space for others to experiment. Who knows maybe an app for
cheap smartphones that takes Pixel quality pics.

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linuxkerneldev
I am curious what is the inference cost of doing this? How much memory and CPU
performance does it take to run the trained network on each image captured by
a camera. Are we talking about milliseconds and can it be run on a phone?

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renaudg
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this space. It reminds me of
this hardware project :

[https://witharsenal.com/features](https://witharsenal.com/features)

Basically a smart remote for your DSLR camera that provides a better, AI-based
auto mode than the native auto mode.

(I have no link with them, but did pre-order it on Kickstarter)

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anotheryou
The example input images are all with bad white balance or underexposed. Easy
to tweak, by hand and automatically.

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pmontra
That would be great if implemented in hardware on phones. Are there already
some contacts with manufacturers?

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revelation
Like those fax machine compression algorithms that end up swapping digits?
Thank you but no thanks.

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uwu
browser zooming doesn't work on the site (seems like it's caused by using
viewport-relative units in css for the font size)

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jordache
so they created something like snapseed?

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andrewdon
iphone 3gs, really?

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art4ur
It's a good baseline. Almost any phone you pick up will do equivalent or
better.

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cmaxwell
Basically it is the same as clicking the auto buttons in Lightroom or any
photo software.

Raised the exposure when needed, fixed white balance, etc...photoshop has been
doing this since like 1990.

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bcraven
Or perhaps this can be used as a dataset to improve the auto buttons in such
software.

