Apple has begun to try to bring the effect of the SLR comparable to the iPhone

The Verge Chinese Station reported on September 9

When Apple introduced its own new-generation iPhone, it once again emphasized the ability to photograph. Yes, on the iPhone's camera development, Apple has formed a fairly large team. In the same way, the iPhone is ultimately the result of photography, which also makes Apple maintain its leading position in the field of smart phone camera. In recent years, however, competition from Samsung and other manufacturers has put pressure on Apple.

The latest iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus naturally have a significant increase over previous generations of iPhones, and Apple has also joined the ISP's image signal processing system. Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing director, said that this AI-driven ISP can perform up to 100 billion operations in 25 milliseconds. Although we only had a brief experience at the press conference and could not actually feel the charm of new technologies, we have already seen this popular fuzzy photography technique on the simulated color dot effect on the conference poster.

Apple took a rather nice name, called "Bokeh." The word originated from the Japanese “boke-aji” and was officially established in 1997 by Mike Johnston, editor of photography technology magazine. Bokeh is a very bizarre photography technique that blurs the background image and then focuses the light source on the subject of the photo to a greater extent. This is the reason why Apple blurs all sorts of dots on the press conference invitation.

The best way to achieve this effect is to use a shallow depth of field. If you use a standard SLR camera, you can easily increase the aperture and allow more light to enter into this effect. On professional cameras, this is easy to implement, but it is more difficult on non-reverse or low-end card cameras. It's even harder to implement on a device as thin as a smartphone. In the past, we could achieve this effect through the later “tweening”, but since we cannot control the size of the lens on a mobile phone, it is very difficult to achieve a blurred background effect.

And this is the advantage of artificial intelligence. Yes, we are not talking about artificial assistants such as Siri or Cortana, nor are we programming languages ​​that help us with search or mail search. This is a computer vision artificial intelligence system that automatically understands the contents of an analysis photo. This technology can be used to handle many complex tasks, such as Facebook face recognition or Google image search algorithm. Now if the application is on the camera's camera function, it means that the subject of the photo can be automatically analyzed and the background can be adjusted according to the theme.

This is a very difficult operation for the machine. In general, the software can only understand a series of content about the color change of the photo, and the algorithm usually does not have the concept of the theme and cannot distinguish the foreground or the background image. They cannot distinguish a cat or a dog, or the clouds in the sky. Therefore, researchers hope to use artificial intelligence to train machines to learn these contents. By learning thousands of examples, software and programs can begin to understand and understand the contents of photos. They can distinguish between the forest and the sky of the background, or the overlapping of two different objects can be further distinguished, which is the owner, which is a dog.

These programs are often called neural networks because they deal with these examples in a similar way to the human brain, but with more emphasis on probability. So when the system gives enough photos of the cat as an example, the machine will begin to make a high-precision comparison between the photo and the cat's form to determine whether it matches the cat's image. And Facebook has begun to use this technology to help blind users see the content of the photo, and show it in the form of a verbal description. Google also used this technology to find images with no marks or names that did not match the name "mountain" or "beach."

For Apple, this technology seems to be more practical. The new iPhone 7 and the dual camera iPhone 7 Plus built-in system can help the camera understand the contents of the photo. Once the target and background are identified, the iPhone 7 can automatically start performing tasks. These include brake adjustment exposure, focus, and white balance. Last year it bought a company called Perceptio, and the company's trick is to focus on a more advanced image recognition system, with faster speed, without relying on a large amount of known data.

The iPhone 7 Plus has more advanced content that can blur the background. Capture a different depth of field with the iPhone 7 Plus's dual camera to create a depth map, which comes from a previous Apple patent. In the vertical screen reality, iPhone 7 Plus can provide Mitsui effect similar to SLR, and all this through the f/1.8 aperture adjustment, allowing more light to enter, there is a main enhanced shallow depth of field effect.

This is a function that needs to master the skills, but also help the iPhone 7 to become the best smartphone on the market. Regardless of whether or not you agree with this statement, it cannot be denied that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus now have similar SLR effects.

So while at the press conference, Schiller used the phrase "to be better than before," but in terms of actual functions, it was far from as simple as we thought. This time, we don’t need to do much to make more beautiful photos, and the main force we’re responsible for playing this time is not only the hardware but also the smart software and systems behind the scenes. (Original author: Nick Statt compilation: Bear)

Source: The Verge

The Chinese related rights of the works of The Verge in the United States belong to Tencent Corporation and may not be reproduced or excerpted without authorization.

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