1y ago

A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

appleinsider.com A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn't match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it's a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.

Technology @lemmy.ml

A bride-to-be discovers a reality-bending mistake in Apple's computational photography

appleinsider.com /articles/23/11/30/a-bride-to-be-discovers-a-reality-bending-mistake-in-apples-computational-photography

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100 comments

This story may be amusing, but it's actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone's photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example -- or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.
- I see your point, though I wouldn't put it that far. It's an edge case that has to happen in a very short duration.
  Similar effects can be acheived with traditional cameras with rolling shutter.
  If you're only concerned of relative positions of different people during a time frame, I don't think you need to be that worried. Being aware of it is enough.
  
  I don't think that's what's happening. I think Apple is "filming" over the course of the seconds you have the camera open, and uses the press of the shutter button to select a specific shit from the hundreds of frames that have been taken as video. Then, some algorithm appears to be assembling different portions of those shots into one "best" shot.
  It's not just a mechanical shutter effect.
- It should be. All computational photography has zero business being used in court
  
  We might be exaggerating the issue here. Fallibility has always been an issue with court evidence. Analog photos can be doctored too.
  
  All digital photography is computational. I think the word you're looking for is composite, not computational.
  
  With all the image manipulation and generation tools available to even amateurs, I'm not sure how any photography is admissible as evidence these days.
  At some point there's going to have to be a whole bunch of digital signing (and timestamp signatures) going on inside the camera for things to be even considered.
- I'm still waiting for the first time somebody uses it to zoom in on a car number plate and it helpfully fills it in with some AI bullshit with something else entirely.
  We've already seen such a thing with image compression.
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/xerox-scanners-alter-numbers-in-scanned-documents/
  
  This was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn't AI per se, but the fact that a jury couldn't be relied upon to understand a black box algorithm and its possible artifacts, the zoomed video was disallowed.
  (this in no way implies that I agree with the court.)
- This isn't an issue at all it's a bullshit headline. And it worked.
  This is the result of shooting in panorama mode.
  In other news, the sky is blue
- Like, an episode of Bones or some shit.

Saved you a click
- Preventing people from perpetuating clickbait "journalism" is so punk rock.
- Damn, this photo is weirdly unsettling to me
  
  I'm totally getting Black Swan vibes.
- Not even a mistake, this is unavoidable if you move during a panorama. iPhones can't pause time. Cool photo tho
  
  Thank you for saying this. If you have ever shot a panoramic shot you know how steady you need to keep it on the line, otherwise you get a lot of weird things like this, not to mention if your moving while it’s happening.
- MVP

Uhm, ok?
The way the girl’s post is written, it’s like she found out Apple made camera lenses from orphans’ retinas (“almost made me vomit on the street”). I assumed it was well known that iPhone takes many photos and stitches the pic together (hence the usually great quality). Now the software made a mistake, resulting in a definitely cool/interesting pic, but that’s it.
Also, maybe stop flailing your arms around when you want your pic taken in your wedding dress.
- When have panorama photos ever not done weird stuff?

Who wants photos of a fake reality? Might as well just AI generate them.
- Generally the final photo is an accurate representation of a moment. Everything in this photo happened. It’s not really generating anything that wasn’t there. You can sometimes get similar results by exploiting the rolling shutter effect.
  https://camerareviews.com/rolling-shutter/
  It’s not like they’re superimposing an image of the moon over a night sky photo to fake astrophotography or something.
  
  deleted
- A photo is a fake reality. It's a capture of the world from the perspective of a camera that no person has ever seen.
  Sure we can approximate with viewfinders and colour match as much as possible but it's not reality. Take a photo of a light bulb, versus look at a light bulb, as one obvious example.
  This is just one other way to get less consistency in the time of different parts of the photos, but overall better capture what we want to see in a photo.
  
  Your argument makes literally no sense. You're, baselessly, assuming a person's perspective is a prism of reality. There's no such a thing - in fact, I'd rather trust reality as being detected by the sensors of a camera, with their known flaws, attributes and parameters, than trust the biological sensors at the back of your eyes or the biological wiring to the inside of your skull.
  
  However I think most cameras and most people traditionally have wanted the most accurate photos possible. If the camera is outputting fiction that can be a big problem.
  
  I agree with this comment but I don't like it 😤
- To their credit, it's not "fake". This isn't from generative AI, this is from AI picking from multiple different exposures of the same shot and stitching various parts of them together to create the "best" version of the photo.
  Everything seen in the photo was still 100% captured in-lens. Just... not at the exact same time.
- deleted
- It's not the case as someone already explained, but also, who care about the photo being fake ? People take photos to show to other people and keep a memory, and that photo looking better than reality is usually not an issue. I would still prefer choice with a toggle somewhere, which we will never get with an Apple product.
- My take exactly.

Seriously? She almost vomited because the photos didn’t match? Give me a fucking break!
- I’m pretty sure that was just a joke.
- The woman in question is a comedian.
- You think that's absurd? Have you never gotten married? Wedding photos are extremely important and while "she almost vomited" may be hyperbole, I can definitely understand being very pissed off if that was the only version of the photo. Our wedding photographer whitened our teeth in our photos and we requested that they undo that so we look like ourselves. The sentiment was nice, but we didn't want that. I would have been pretty unhappy if they hadn't held onto the originals and were unable to revert our teeth back to their normal shades. Photos of our bridal showers and dress hunting were nearly as important as the wedding photos themselves. I can understand being upset with this undesired result.

Ah yes, I remember noticing it would make like a short video instead of one picture, back when I had an iPhone. I turned that function off because I didn't see the benefits.
- That’s not what this is. I also turned that off, it’s called “Live Photo” or something like that. Honestly I find it to be a dumb feature.
  What this is, is the iPhone taking a large number of images and stitching them together for better results.
  
  Oh, okay. My bad. Thanks for explaning.
  
  It's not dumb. It let's you select the best moment within a 1-2 second margin after or before you took the picture.

It's a really cool discovery, but I don't know how Apple is suppose to program against it.
What surprises me is how much of a time range each photo has to work with. Enough time for Tessa to put down one arm and then the other. It's basically recording a mini-video and selecting frames from it. I wonder if turning off things like Live Photo (which retroactively starts the video a second or two before you actually press record) would force the Camera app to select from a briefer range of time.
Maybe combining facial recognition with post processing to tell the software that if it thinks it's looking at multiple copies of the same person, it needs to time-sync the sections of frames chosen for the final photo. It wouldn't be foolproof, but it would be better than nothing.
- Program against it? It's a camera. Put what's on the light sensor into the file, you're done. They programmed to make this happen, by pretending that multiple images are the same image.
  
  That’s over simplified. There’s only so much you can get on a sensor at the sizes in mobile devices. To compensate there’s A LOT of processing that goes on. Even higher end DSLR cameras are doing post processing.
  Even shooting RAW like you’re suggesting involves some amount of post processing for things like lens corrections.
  It’s all that post processing that allows us to have things like HDR images for example. It also allows us to compensate for various lighting and motion changes.
  Mobile phone cameras are more about the software than the hardware these days
  
  What's on the light sensor when? There's no shutter, it can just capture a continuous stream of light indefinitely.
  Most people want a rough representation of what's hitting the sensor when they push the button. But they don't actually care about the sensor, they care about what they can see, which doesn't include the blur from the camera wobbling, or the slight blur of the subject moving.
  They want the lighting to match how they perceived the scene, even though that isn't what the sensor picked up, because your brain edits what you see before you comprehend the image.
  Doing those corrections is a small step to incorporating discontinuities in the capture window for better results.
- Or maybe just don’t move your arm for literally less than a second while the foto(s) is/are taken.. Moving your arm(s) down happens in less than a second if one just let them fall by gravity. It’s a funny pic nonetheless.

I may have missed this in the comments already but it is really important to note here that the article says the photo was taken using panorama mode, which is why the computational photography thing is even an issue. If you have used panorama mode ever you should go in expecting some funkiest, especially if someone in the shot is moving, as the bride apparently was when it was shot.

Stop posting apple advertisments.

There’s a note at the end of the article that says it was take using pano. So this is doubly unsurprising. Despite the instagram caption reading it wasn’t.

MKBHD made an interesting video about this already a year ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ8giCWDcyE
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=MZ8giCWDcyE
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

This person is an actress and comedian. This is not an iPhone error; it's just a manually-edited photo from three separate takes that she pretended came out of the phone as-is. It's a hoax for laughs/attention.

100 comments