It is a requirement for companies like Samsung to be on the news all the time given that other small companies in smartphone market are growing rapidly. But recently, Samsung is trending in the news all for the wrong reasons.

There were multiple articles and videos claiming that Samsung was faking its moon photos and the moon pictures that were captured by Samsung phones are AI generated.

It all started from Reddit, where a user called u/ibreakphotos posted the following article. All he did was take a photo of a moon, uploaded it on computer and digitally reduce it to 170 x170 picture. He also applied a blur to eliminate any detail and put it on Fullscreen.

He walked to the other side of the room, took his Samsung phone and zoomed all the way to the monitor and clicked a picture. The picture he got was may more crisper and clearer than the image on monitor.

He was convinced and concluded that the Samsung was just pasting a fake moon photo on to the images taken.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take lot of AI processing to make this happen. Earth’s view of moon is fixed. And we always see same side of the moon all the time. So all AI has to do is learn the craters, brightest and darkest places, highlands and lowlands on moon.

With thousands of moon photos on the internet by NASA and other space stations, and with Samsung’s processing, the phone recognizes the moon, starts it’s neural engine and generates the image with greater details. Samsung calls this scene optimization.

IS THIS BAD?

Its not white or black. It is always grey. We all know that Samsung has the best processing of images on all devices no matter the price. It has marketed it’s S series phones as photography experts. With 100x zoom on its S23 ultra, Samsung literally wants to reach sky.

Even before release, Samsung S23 series launch images included moon photos. It wants to hype it’s camera capabilities to everyone. As Samsung’s cameras are no longer way behind Apple’s camera, Samsung tried to erase the feeling that Apple is the only choice if you need best camera phone.

The only thing Samsung should have done is be honest about it and mention that it’s moon and night photos are heavily optimized using AI.

HOW IS THIS GOOD?

Many phones offer the feature similar to this and call them night photography or astrophotography to click images of sky. But it takes special equipment like tripod or gimbal and usage of professional mode to get a decent output. Along with hardware, it also takes lot of skill to click good night sky pictures.

But Samsung has done magic with its optimization. Gone are those days where one has to have a great knowledge on using pro mode to get good photos. You can just open your camera app, click on shutter button and be confident that you got a good reliable photo.

Reliability is where Samsung shines. Even though Samsung has trained it’s phone to recognize moon photos, one can not cheat it. It only turns on scene optimization when it zooms after 30x and recognizes the moon with good accuracy.

This scene optimization also happens to normal zoomed photos. You can click a person, mountain or a billboard, Samsung applies some kind of optimization to make it look better and sharp.

It is really good to see phones working on cameras not only on a hardware front but also on a software front. So let us appreciate Samsung for what it has achieved.

Many people also argue that an image which is optimized heavily is not an ORIGINAL image. It questions the reliability of brands.

But all I say is “If the photos look good, that’s enough”

Let us know what you feel about this in comments section. Also read my other articles here.

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Written by
Rajasimha
Instagram – rajasimha0