Samsung faked zooming in on the moon

For many years, phones with “Space Zoom” capabilities from Samsung have been known to be able to Take incredibly detailed pictures of the moon. But the last post on Reddit Show in stark terms Just the amount of computational processing the company does, and — given the evidence presented — it looks like we should go ahead and say it: Samsung’s moon photos are fake.

But what exactly does “fake” mean in this scenario? It’s a difficult question to answer, and one that will become increasingly important and complex as computational techniques are integrated more into the photographic process. We can say with certainty that our understanding of what makes the image forged It will change soon, just as it did in the past to accommodate digital cameras, Photoshop filters, Instagram and more. But for now, let’s stick to Samsung’s case and the moon.

Samsung phones tested by Reddit user u/ibreakphotos He was brilliant in his simplicity. They intentionally created a blurry image of the moon, displayed it on a computer monitor, and Then I shot this photo with my Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image appeared on the screen No details at all, but the resulting image showed a crisp, clear “image” of the Moon. The S23 Ultra added details that weren’t there before. There was no upgrading of the faded pixels and no recovery of seemingly lost data. There was just a new moon – a false moon.

Here is the faint image of the moon that was used:

GIF of the photo capture process:

And the resulting “image”:

This is not a new controversy. People have been asking questions about Samsung’s moon photography ever since the company unveiled a 100x “Space Zoom” feature on its S20 Ultra in 2020. Some have accused the company of simply copying and pasting high-quality textures onto images of the moon to produce its images, but Samsung says the process More complicated than that.

in 2021, Introducing the mag published Extended feature on “fake detailed moon photos” taken by Galaxy S21 Ultra. Samsung told the publication that “no image overlay or texture effects are applied when taking a photo” but the company uses artificial intelligence to detect the presence of the moon and “then offers the functionality to improve detail by reducing blur and noise.”

The company later provided more information on the matter blog post (Translated from Korean by Google). But the core of the explanation—describe the vital step that takes us from a hazy moon image to a sharp moon—is dealt with in vague terms. Samsung simply says that it uses a “detail optimization engine function” to “Effective way Remove noise and maximize moon detail to complete a bright, clear picture of the moon” (emphasis added). What does that mean? We simply don’t know.

A generous explanation is that Samsung’s process captures blurry details in the original photo and then upscales them using AI. This is an established technology that has its problems (see: Xerox copiers change numbers when upscaling the blurry originals), and I don’t think that would make the resulting image fake. But as Reddit’s tests show, Samsung’s process is more intrusive than this: It doesn’t just improve the sharpness of blurry details — it Creates they. At this point, I think most people would agree that the resulting photo is fake, for better or for worse.

The difficulty here is that the concept of “fake” is a spectrum, not a binary. (Like all the categories we use to divide the world.) For photography, the criterion for “realism” is usually determined by the information the optical sensor receives: the light captured when the photo is taken. You can then edit this information very extensively the way professional photographers edit RAW images, adjusting color, exposure, contrast, etc., but the end result isn’t fake. In this particular case, the moon photos captured by a Samsung phone seem less the result of photometric data and more the product of a mathematical process. In other words: it is more of a constructed image than an image.

Some may not agree with this definition, and that’s okay. Drawing this distinction will also become more difficult in the future. Since smartphone manufacturers began using computational techniques to overcome the limitations of smartphones’ small camera sensors, the mix of “optically captured” and “software-generated” data in their outputs has changed. We are definitely heading into the future where technologies like Samsung’s Detail Enhancement Engine will become more popular and applied on a larger scale. You can train the Detail Enhancement Engines on all kinds of data, like the faces of your family and friends to make sure you never take a bad picture of them, or on famous landmarks to improve your vacation shots. Over time, we may forget that we label such photos as fake.

But for now Samsung’s Moonshots are showing up, and I think that’s because it’s an app that’s particularly suited to this type of computational photography. For a start, the depiction of the moon is visually impressive. The Moon looks more or less the same in every photograph taken from Earth (ignore liberations And rotational differences), and although it has detail, it has no depth. This makes AI improvements relatively easy to add. And second: photographing the moon Catnip Marketing Because a) everyone knows phones take bad pictures of the moon and b) everyone can test the feature for themselves. This made it an easy way for Samsung to demonstrate its phones’ photographic prowess. Just take a look at this ad for the S23 Ultra with the moon’s 11-second zoom in:

It was this viral appeal that got the company into trouble. Without properly explaining the feature, Samsung has let many people confuse its AI-enhanced photos for a physics-defying optical zoom that can’t be put into a smartphone. This, in turn, made others eager to expose the photos (because the tech world loves scandal). Samsung doesn’t quite claim its moonshots represent everyone It’s zoom photography, but the consumer would be forgiven for thinking that, so it’s worth emphasizing what’s really going on.

Ultimately, photography changes, and our understanding of what constitutes a “real photo” will change with it. But for now, it seems fair to conclude that Samsung’s moon photos are more fake than real. Presumably, in a few years, this may not last. Samsung did not immediately respond to the edgeComment asked, but we’ll update this piece if they get back to us. In the meantime, if you want to take a crisp photo of the moon with your Samsung device, just turn off the “Scene Optimizer” feature and get ready to take a photo of a blurry circle in the sky.