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NASA’s Starshade is a Flag for Blocking Starlight in Space Photo Shoots

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Photographers use tools called flags to block and control light. NASA has detailed a new technology called a starshade that’s essentially a gigantic flag in space for doing photo shoots with space telescopes.

“Although starshades have never flown in space, they hold the potential to enable groundbreaking observations of planets beyond our solar system, including pictures of planets as small as Earth,” NASA writes.

A starshade mission would involve two spacecraft working together with extreme precision. One would be a space telescope (the camera) that can hunt for and photograph planets that orbit stars outside of our solar system. The

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This AI Can ‘Bring a Person to Life’ from a Single Still Photo

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Researchers have created an AI that can animate a human subject from a single still photograph, “bringing them to life” by making them walk, run, sit, or jump out of a photo in 3D.

“Photo Wake-Up: 3D Character Animation from a Single Photo” is the new paper describing the technology advancements made by the computer scientists at the University of Washington and Facebook.

After analyzing a photo to detect the human(s) within, the AI turns the person’s silhouette into an animatable mesh after identifying and labeling the various body parts. The 2D-to-3D person has details extracted from the

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This AI Can Tell When Faces in Photos Were Photoshopped

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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Fake photos are a rampant issue in our digital age, but researchers are working hard to restore a greater degree of trust to photography. One team has created a new AI that can detect when faces in photos were manipulated using Photoshop.

The researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley have published their work in a new paper titled, “Detecting Photoshopped Faces by Scripting Photoshop,” explaining how the new method can figure out if Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature was used.

First, the researchers trained a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using thousands of portraits scraped from the Internet that

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This AI Can Tell When Faces in Photos Were Photoshopped

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


Click here to view on the original site: Original Post



Fake photos are a rampant issue in our digital age, but researchers are working hard to restore a greater degree of trust to photography. One team has created a new AI that can detect when faces in photos were manipulated using Photoshop.

The researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley have published their work in a new paper titled, “Detecting Photoshopped Faces by Scripting Photoshop,” explaining how the new method can figure out if Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature was used.

First, the researchers trained a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using thousands of portraits scraped from the Internet that

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Sony Should Split From Its Sensor Business: Investor

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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One of Sony’s crown jewels in its empire is its image sensor business, which dominates global market share and has helped the company hit record profits. But now a famous investor is calling for Sony to spin-off the sensor business into a completely independent company.

The Nikkei Asian Review reports that American activist investor Daniel Loeb has invested in a $1.5 billion stake in Sony and is now calling on the company to spin off its sensor business “to unlock the Japanese group’s true worth as a global entertainment powerhouse.”

Sony already spun off the sensor business as

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This Software Can Undistort Faces at the Edges of Wide-Angle Photos

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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If you’ve ever found yourself at the edges of a group photo captured with a wide-angle lens, you may have noticed some strange stretching, squishing, and/or skewing that distort your face. Researchers have now created software that can automatically fix these wide-angle face distortions without affecting other parts of the photo.

In a paper titled “Distortion-Free Wide-Angle Portraits on Camera Phones,” a group of researchers at Google and MIT led by YiChang Shih introduce a new algorithm they created that allows for, as the name states, distortion-free wide-angle portraits shot using camera phones.

“In spite of the rapid proliferation of

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These Deepfakes of Famous People Are Testing Facebook’s Policies

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Facebook has recently taken a position of not removing faked videos, choosing instead to reduce their reach and display them alongside fact-checking information. Now a series of viral deepfake videos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other famous individuals is putting Facebook’s policies to the test.

Motherboard reports that artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe recently partnered with the advertising Canny to create AI-generated fake videos of people talking about a mysterious “Spectre,” which is actually an exhibition the artists put on at the Sheffield Doc Fest in the UK.

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Oppo and Xiaomi Give Sneak Peeks of Under-Display Selfie Cameras

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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To avoid the dreaded “camera notch” interrupting smartphone screens, some manufacturers have begun introducing pop-up or flip-up selfie cameras. But, thankfully, the future looks like it will be more elegant with the introduction of cameras hidden under the displays themselves.

The Chinese smartphone makers Oppo and Xiaomi have both shared short videos showing their respective under-display camera technologies in action.

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How Google’s Handheld Multi-Frame Super-Resolution Tech Works

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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Since there are physical limits to how large sensors can be in smartphones, companies like Google have been pushing heavily into computational photography, the use of digital rather than optical processes to improve the capabilities of a camera. Here’s a 3-minute video that explains how Google’s super-resolution technology works.

“Compared to DSLR cameras, smartphone cameras have smaller sensors, which limits their spatial resolution; smaller apertures, which limits their light gathering ability; and smaller pixels, which reduces their signal-to-noise ratio,” the Google researchers write in the paper behind the video. “The use of color filter arrays (CFAs) requires demosaicing, which further

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Samsung AI Can Turn a Single Portrait Into a Realistic Talking Head

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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There have been huge advancements in recent years in the area of AI “deepfakes”, or fake photos or videos of humans created using neural networks. Fake videos of a person usually require a large number of photos of that individual, but Samsung has figured out how to create realistic talking heads from as little as a single portrait photo.

In a newly published paper titled, “Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models,” a team of researchers at the Samsung AI Center in Moscow, Russia, share their new system that has this “few-shot capability.”

The Samsung

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Sony Developed a Color Film That Can Be Erased and Reused

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Sony announced today that it has developed a new rewritable film material. Just as rewritable optical discs can be erased and written to again, Sony’s new film can have full-color photos drawn onto them, be erased, and then be reused for another photo.

First of all, this new film isn’t a photographic film that’s designed to be used in cameras, but rather it’s a film that can be applied to surfaces for displaying photos. It’s unclear whether the technology could be one day used to create a reusable kind of camera film — something that would be revolutionary.

Sony’s new

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Samsung Unveils the World’s First 64-Megapixel Smartphone Sensor

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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Samsung just announced the world’s first 64-megapixel smartphone camera sensor, less than a year after Sony made waves with its groundbreaking 48-megapixel smartphone sensor.

The new Samsung ISOCELL Bright GW1 sensor features an ultra-small pixel size of 0.8 micrometers (μm), the same size found on Sony’s IMX586 sensor and currently the smallest pixel size on the market. Samsung’s previous top resolution for 0.8μm sensors was 20 megapixels.

“Over the past few years, mobile phone cameras have become the main instrument for recording and sharing our everyday moments,” says Samsung sensor EVP Yongin Park. “With more pixels and advanced

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Nubia Red Magic 3 Smartphone Shoots 8K and Has a Built-In Cooling Fan

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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The Chinese smartphone company Nubia has unveiled the Red Magic 3, a phone that shoots 48-megapixel photos and 8K video. The performance of the device is so intense that it features liquid cooling via a copper heat pipe and a built-in cooling fan.

The Red Magic 3 is marketed as a smartphone that excels at gaming, but it’s beast on the photography and video fronts as well.

Inside the phone is a 1/2.0″ Sony IMX586 sensor for 48-megapixel f/1.7 rear photos. The front features a 16-megapixel f/2.0 camera.

On the video front, the smartphone sets new

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Samsung Patents Wraparound Display That Aids in Photos and Selfies

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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Samsung has patented an unusual smartphone design that features a display that wraps around the phone from the front to the back over the top edge. It’s a single display that could provide a simultaneous live view on the back while shooting rear-camera photos.

The patent, spotted by Let’s Go Digital, is titled “Electronic Device Having Plurality of Display and Method for Controlling Same.”

The display has interesting applications for photography. First, as with a standalone rear screen, the display would allow you to shoot selfies using the rear camera, eliminating the need for a front camera —

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Kandao Uses AI to Turn 30fps Footage into 300fps Super Slow Mo

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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The Chinese 360°/VR camera and software company Kandao has announced a new technology called AI Slow-Motion that uses machine learning to turn ordinary footage into super slow motion shots. For example, it can make a 30fps video look like it was shot at 300fps.

Neural networks are used to predict and fill in the extra frames between actual frames, resulting in smooth, cinematic video from existing videos while optimizing quality.

“Using the new feature, users can slow down the footage to up to 10x slow motion after taking them,” Kandao says. “For example, a 360-degree video originally captured at 8k

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This Robot Photographer Just Shot Her First Wedding

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Robot photographers may be coming soon to a wedding near you. An AI-powered photography robot named Eva just shot her first wedding over in the UK.

Bride magazine reports that Eva was hired by a couple named Gary and Megan for their April 7th wedding at the Wroxall Abbey Estate in Warwickshire.

Created by the England-based Service Robots and launched in February 2019, the nearly 5-foot-tall Eva is designed to roam about in a space (using infrared sensors after smart mapping the building), use facial recognition to “latch onto” one or more guests, and then ask to snap their photo.

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How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole

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The first-ever picture of a black hole was unveiled yesterday, generating a huge amount of interest and excitement across the world. But how exactly was this picture captured? Well, it definitely wasn’t as simple as “pointing and clicking” a giant camera.

One of the researchers who has become a poster child of the black hole photo project is MIT grad student Katie Bouman, who helped to develop the algorithm that turned raw telescope data into the black hole picture. A photo she posted on Facebook of herself watching the groundbreaking photo being reconstructed has gone wildly viral online over

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This is the World’s First Photo of a Black Hole

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This is the first photo ever captured of a black hole. It was revealed today after years of international collaboration between over 200 international astronomers.

At a coordinated press conference across the globe, researchers at the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced that their efforts in using a planet-scale array of eight ground-based telescopes succeeded in its mission of capturing images of a black hole.

The “monster” black hole measures 40 billion kilometers (~25 billion miles) across — that’s nearly 29,000 Suns — and is located 500 million trillion kilometers (~311 million trillion miles) away at the heart of the Messier

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Russia Created a Shotgun-Toting Drone for Shooting Down Other Drones

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Russia has created a new drone with a built-in shotgun that’s specifically designed to shoot other drones out of the sky.

Consumer camera drones are making headlines for all kinds of wrong reasons these days, causing governments and industry to scramble to create effective anti-drone measures. Everything from specially-trained eagles to “energy weapons” to “special” shotgun shells have been unveiled in recent times. Over in Russia, the new idea is to mount a shotgun to a drone itself.

The Russian defense blog Dambiev reports that the prominent Russian defense contractor JSC Almaz Antey has patented a new shotgun-wielding drone.

The

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Quad Pixel AF May Be the Followup to Canon’s Dual Pixel AF

This post is by Michael Zhang from PetaPixel


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Canon may be developing a Quad Pixel Autofocus sensor as the followup to its highly-regarding Dual Pixel AF. A newly-surfaced patent shows a sensor in which each pixel is split into not two, but four areas.

First launched in the 70D APS-C DSLR back in 2013, Dual Pixel AF spits each pixel on a sensor into two light-sensitive photodiodes. Since each half independently detects light through separate microlenses, the signals can be analyzed to glean focus information. The result of this is a phase-detection AF system that provides fast and accurate autofocus for both still photos and video.

Canon News

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