Samsung has admitted using AI to enhance Galaxy S-Series users’ photos of the moon, following a well-shared Reddit post that accused the company of faking the images.
Considering Samsung had previously sort of addressed the issue and made a similar admission (albeit in Korean) before, this was a little bit of a storm in a teacup. However, it left some users wondering whether their photos were basically superimposed with an AI image of the moon.
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In a blog post, Samsung goes into lots of detail on how the detailed photos of the moon are reached. It essentially combines its super resolution camera tech with advanced artificial intelligence to enhance detail on the moon’s surface, but there’s plenty more in-between.
The company said the Scene Optimiser feature has able to recognise the moon as a specific object since the Galaxy S21. That in itself works via AI. While the Super Resolution feature is automatically enabled at 25x zoom.
Samsung says the moon mode takes over 10 frames to help capture more detail, and those images can be matched up to enhance clarity. Samsung’s Zoom Lock feature also helps to create the most stable images possible, the company says, while there are also brightness optimisations.
It’s then when the AI-based “detail enhancement” comes in, which it explains in the blog post, but railed against the criticism that it claims used “a moon shot deliberately edited to be blurry.”
“After Multi-frame Processing has taken place, Galaxy camera further harnesses Scene Optimiser’s deep-learning-based AI detail enhancement engine to effectively eliminate remaining noise and enhance the image details even further,” Samsung says in the blog post.
Samsung says it will continue to work to enhance the Scene Optimiser feature to reduce potential confusion over images taken on its phones and actual images of the moon. So, essentially, yes, that detail is somewhat artificial, but there’s plenty of work that goes into making these photos as authentic as possible.
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