With the recent Samsung moon shot controversy picking up steam, a YouTuber, who also happens to be an engineer, uses maths and logic to help viewers distinguish between a fake image from a real one. Much of what he says makes sense, suggesting that Samsung may have received unwarranted criticism of its technology to produce such images. Let us take a look at what valuable information he provides.

Samsung is using what the engineer calls a Convolution Neural Network, which helps to pull back as much detail as it can from the moon

Before starting his explanation, Eric states that what he is about to say does not mean that he is defending Samsung for the company’s recent actions but wants people to become better informed on how these images look the way they do. First, he asks the audience how they differentiate between what is fake and what is real. Later, he shows an image of the moon taken from an iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is nothing but a white blob.

However, while the image taken from the iPhone 14 Pro Max is real, it is not an accurate representation of what the person sees when he or she is looking at the moon when that image is captured, which is the purpose of cameras; to store and relive memories exactly as you saw it with your own eyes. The YouTuber also mentions that what Samsung does is explained in an articlepublished by the company.

To enhance the image of the moon, the camera takes at least 10 pictures and uses image processing to remove blemishes and noise, also known as film grain. Then, the detailed portion of these moon shots is combined to create a single, detailed image, which is further enhanced using AI that has been trained to recognize the moon in every phase. Eric also mentions u/ibreakphotos, the Redditor who used a Gaussian Blur and other steps to show that Samsung was misleading its customers with its ‘enhanced’ moon shots.

Picture of the moon taken from an iPhone 14 Pro Max is just a while blob

Fortunately for the company, the YouTuber states that while the Redditor used a Gaussian Blur to mimic a moon shot, it is the exact opposite of what Samsung is doing, which is a Convolution Neural Network. Eric also says that the Redditor downscaled the image of the moon to 170 x 170, which removed a ton of detail, and then applied the Gaussian Blur. When working with such minimized detail, Samsung’s AI has to take the best guess at what it is working with, so the end result will not perfectly match the original, downscaled image.

Redditor u/ibreakphotos comparing moon shots. The end result has a brown tint thanks to Samsung’s Convoluted Convolution Neural Network in action, which was already working with low detail as the image was downscaled to 170 x 170 pixels

The reason why the image that you are seeing appears brown, with a loss of quality around the edge, is Samsung’s Convolution Neural Network in action, with Eric providing a linkto a video for viewers who want to learn more about how this technology works. When removing the brown tint, you can see how close Samsung was in reversing the Gaussian Blur.

The YouTuber removed the brown tint from the final moon shot, showing how close Samsung was in reversing the Gaussian Blur applied by the Redditor

The problem with this entire set of events was that Samsung was misleading consumers into believing that the company’s top-tier smartphone had cameras doing all the hard work, not AI. This would likely lead a flagship phone owner to believe that if moon shots can come out incredibly detailed, then that 100x zoom can churn out nearly every image as a detailed one.

There are other scenarios in which the YouTuber attempts to test out Samsung’s zoom functionality, attempting to take the AI image processing to its limits. Since we are discussing moon shots right now, we do not want to get sidetracked, but rest assured, we will discuss this topic in a later post. For now, we want to ask our readers on what they think about this explanation. When you have the time, check out the video provided above, and if you want your high-end Samsung phone to stop taking ‘fake’ moon shots, you can follow our detailed guideon how this is done.

News Source: Techisode TV