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Posts Tagged ‘AIpowered’

Sony adds AI-powered ‘Live Gallery’ feature to its Visual Story mobile app

31 Mar

Sony Electronics recently announced updates to its Visual Story, a cloud-based mobile application that works with various models of cameras the company produces. Built with event photographers in mind, ‘Visual Story’ Version 1.1 uses AI (artificial intelligence) to instantly recognize scenes and objects. The app will continuously select what it deems the best images for real-time gallery creation.

What this means, for these socially-distanced times, is that friends, family and colleagues can view the highlights of a wedding, conference or sporting match, while it’s happening, in the comfort of their own homes or offices. The ‘Live Gallery’ feature also applies presets to images as the photos upload, to maximize their visual appeal.

A newly-added object detection filter allows the photographer and viewers to locate a specific photo containing, for example, a wedding cake, soccer ball or table. The audience can also ‘like’ specific photos. This can aid the photographer in curating images for a final gallery before it’s delivered to the client.

Photographers can also add their own logo plus links to their website and social media profiles to galleries for branding purposes, not to mention increased exposure to the audiences.

Visual Story allows you to access photos from any specific time during the event. Photos are stored to the cloud for backup as well. Photographers can also add their own logo plus links to their website and social media profiles to galleries for branding purposes, not to mention increased exposure to the audiences.

Currently available for free on iOS, Visual Story is compatible with the following Sony cameras: a7C, a7R IV, a7S III, a9, a9 II, a1, a7 III (with updated firmware) and FX3.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Canon unveils AI-powered automatic camera, the PowerShot PICK

01 Feb

Canon has launched a campaign on the Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake for an AI-powered camera, the PowerShot PICK. The campaign has proven to be highly successful, attracting nearly ¥100,000,000 in support. The goal was ¥1,000,000.

The experimental PowerShot PICK camera can analyze a scene, identify people, track their faces and then, using artificial intelligence, determine the ideal moment to capture a photo. In a rough translation, Canon refers to the PICK as an ‘automatic shooting camera.’ The PowerShot PICK combines Canon’s optical, video processing, and artificial intelligence technology.

In terms of design, the PowerShot PICK is a compact, modern-looking device. It has been designed to blend in, while Canon has also considered ways to give the PICK some character. You can also take the PICK with you when you leave the house, such as when going to a family gathering or an event. You can place the PICK on a tripod as well, and Canon is offering special Velbon tripods as part of the campaign.

The PowerShot PICK uses a 1/2.3-inch 12MP CMOS image sensor. The sensor is paired with a 19-57mm equivalent zoom lens with a maximum aperture of F2.8. The PICK includes built-in image stabilization. The PICK pans 170° in both directions and can tilt 110°. The PICK records to a microSD card and weighs a mere 170g. As you can see in the video above, the PICK is small, with a height of about 3.5″ (90mm) tall.

The Canon PowerShot PICK is a compact device. It has a 360° field of view and incorporates a 12MP image sensor. Image credit: Canon on Masuake

While the PICK is designed to take photos automatically in the background, which Canon believes will result in more authentic images and better mementos, the PowerShot PICK can also be manually controlled using keywords. A user says, ‘Hello PICK,’ followed by commands to take a photo, record video, change subjects and stop capturing.

The PICK will launch alongside a dedicated smartphone app, allowing you to view and share photos and videos captured by PICK. The app automatically recommends the best photos, although you can view all images.

The setup process promises to be easy. After pairing with your smartphone, which is required, you simply power on PICK and place it somewhere, depending on the situation. You could place it on a table at the center of a family meal, on a tripod near an event, on a bookshelf, etc. As mentioned, although PICK can operate automatically, it can be controlled using voice or by using the smartphone app.

The Canon PowerShot PICK is currently available only to backers on Makuake. The price for the PICK works out to just under $ 400. Given the campaign’s success, the only remaining units are for the PICK and charging cable. The tripod bundle has sold out. Canon intends to ship the PICK to backers this July. Canon hasn’t announced global or public release plans, so it’s unclear if the PowerShot PICK will be available outside of Japan. You can learn more about the PowerShot PICK by visiting Makuake.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Kodak Professional Select’s AI-powered virtual assistant speeds up image culling

05 Nov

Kodak has introduced a new application, Kodak Professional Select. The app relies upon proprietary artificial intelligence to cull hundreds to thousands of images based upon technical attributes and aesthetic qualities.

Kodak states that technical attributes include color, focus, brightness, exposure, contrast and sharpness. With respect to aesthetic qualities, the AI looks for eyes being open, smiles and centered faces in your images. Kodak Professional Select then uses this data to select your best images and showcases them in an ‘easy-to-use interface.’ Importantly, the user maintains total control over which images are included in a final selection. The AI has been designed to drastically speed up this process. Kodak promises that ‘image culling is completed in minutes.’

Along with artificial intelligence, Kodak Professional Select allows the user to tag images with keywords, adjust the orientation, add star-based ratings, organize your files and more. You can learn more about Kodak Professional Select and see it in action in Kodak’s video below.

As you can see in the video above, to use Kodak Professional Select you must first sign up and install the required desktop application. This app interacts with Kodak’s cloud-based software. You then select and upload your images, which the software resizes for faster uploading and processing on the cloud. Once your images are uploaded, Professional Select goes to work and analyzes each image, ranking, and organizing your best images from the batch.

You can adjust how Kodak Professional Select prioritizes its evaluation criteria. Further, you can select how many images you desire from the batch. For example, you can prioritize exposure and sharpness and then select that you will want to keep 20 images from a batch of 500.

Kodak Professional Select judges images based upon multiple properties, including color, focus, contrast, and how the faces look in your images. Click to enlarge.

Once the analysis is complete, you will be able to adjust score criteria, add/remove selections, move images between groups, review images that the software determined were nearly identical and more. At this point, you can adjust the orientation of images, rate photos and add keywords. Once you’re all set with your selection, you export your selected images for the next step in your editing workflow.

Kodak Professional Select is compatible with Windows 10 and macOS Mojave (10.14.4) or newer and requires an internet connection. The following file formats are supported: DNG, JPG, RAW, TIF, CRW, CR2, CR3, RAF, 3FR, FFF, ARW, KDC, MRW, MOS, IIQ, NEF, NRW, ORF, RW2, PEF, X3F, SRF.

With its AI, Kodak Professional Select promises to make culling your images much easier and faster than traditional manual analysis. A free trial is available to try the software for yourself.

If you’d like to try Kodak Professional Select to see if it will fit in your workflow and speed up your image culling, there is a free 30-day trial available. After this trial, the ‘virtual assistant’ solution is available in monthly or annual subscriptions. Kodak Professional Select costs $ 29.95 USD per month. If you’d prefer a 12-month subscription, you pay $ 299.95, the equivalent of 10 months. To download the trial, head to Kodak Professional Select’s website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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The World’s First Completely AI-Powered Photo Editor Will Debut Before the Year Is Out

26 Oct

The post The World’s First Completely AI-Powered Photo Editor Will Debut Before the Year Is Out appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jaymes Dempsey.

Skylum’s Luminar AI, billed as “the first image editor fully powered by artificial intelligence,” will come available before the year is out.

Luminar AI is the world's first completely AI-powered photo editor

Already, the image editor has created controversy among photographers thanks to its automated, AI-based approach to image editing, with some claiming that Luminar AI’s easy, no-experience-necessary approach is problematic – or even cheating.

And while we don’t know exactly how the program works, Skylum has released several videos showing off some of Luminar AI’s standout features.

world's first AI-powered photo editor

Highlights include:

  • Composition AI, which automatically straightens your images and suggests cropping based on compositional guidelines and feedback from professional photographers
  • Face AI and Skin AI, which automatically retouch your subjects’ faces for improved teeth, lips, skin, and much more
  • Sky AI, which allows you to instantly swap skies while automatically adjusting for changes in lighting and color
  • Atmosphere AI, which lets you enhance your images with weather effects (such as haze, steam, drizzle, fog, and mist)

To see some of these AI effects in action, check out Skylum’s latest video:

While Luminar AI will be offered as a standalone editing program, Skylum’s most up-to-date software, Luminar 4, already packs some AI-based features (including a popular sky-replacement option). But Luminar AI promises to take AI editing to the next level, opening up advanced post-processing effects to a much larger audience.

Will Luminar AI do everything for you?

It doesn’t seem like it. As Skylum explains, you have to make creative choices; Luminar AI will do a lot of editing work for you, but you’ll remain at the helm.

world's first AI-powered photo editor

As for the Luminar AI release:

The date is currently unknown, but Skylum promises a “holiday season” release. I’d expect an early December debut, though mid-December or late November certainly isn’t out of the question.

In terms of price, you can currently preorder Luminar AI for a discounted rate:

$ 74 USD for a standard copy of Luminar AI, or $ 139 USD to download both Luminar AI and Luminar 4.

So if Luminar AI’s simple approach to editing appeals to you, make sure you take a look while the discount still lasts! You can view the software here.

Now over to you:

What do you think about Luminar AI? Do you like the idea of AI-based editing? Or does it feel like cheating? And will you purchase the program? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post The World’s First Completely AI-Powered Photo Editor Will Debut Before the Year Is Out appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jaymes Dempsey.


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Library of Congress launches AI-powered, image-based Newspaper Navigator tool

26 Sep

The Library of Congress has launched a new AI-powered image-based tool for searching through old newspapers, enabling anyone to find historic images from more than 16 million scanned newspaper pages. Newspaper Navigator builds upon the LOC’s existing Chronicling America project, the result being a visual content recognition model capable of finding a variety of images in digitized newspapers, including maps, comics, photographs, illustrations, advertisements and more.

The Chronicling America project is the LOC’s historic newspaper archive. With this tool, anyone can use optical recognition technology (OCR) to search through a vast archive of digitized newspapers dating back to the late 1700s. Newspaper Navigator builds upon this, introducing the ability to search for images rather than text. The object detection model was trained using annotated newspaper pages from the Chronicling America project, enabling it to extract the visual content from 16,358,041 newspaper pages.

The new tool was created by LOC 2020 Innovator in Residence Benjamin Charles Germain Lee who detailed the project in a new video. In addition to offering a search tool online, the LOC has released the extracted visual content as prepackaged datasets available to download from Github. This prepackaged content is split up by year and includes a variety of metadata alongside the images.

Users can search through more than 1.6 million images sourced from newspapers dated from the year 1900 to 1963. The results are fairly accurate, though the use of optical character recognition for extracting descriptions of the content can be lackluster if the quality of the scanned newspaper text is poor.

The interface includes some useful options, including links for downloading the images, viewing the full newspaper issues, learning more about the newspapers and getting citations for images. This assumes one is using the online search tool and not the prepackaged downloadable image datasets available on Github, of course.

Newspaper Navigator is ultimately the largest single dataset of extracted visual content sourced from historic newspapers that has ever been assembled, according to the full study. Machine learning technology has produced an unprecedented way to rapidly sort through digitized materials that would otherwise be far too expansive to search manually.

As for using the images found through Newspaper Navigator, the rights and reproduction terms are found under the wider Chronicling America project. According to the project’s About page, the LOC:

…believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety. Any newspapers in Chronicling America that were published less than 95 years ago are also believed to be in the public domain, but may contain some copyrighted third party materials. Researchers using newspapers published less than 95 years ago should be alert for modern content (for example, registered and renewed for copyright and published with notice) that may be copyrighted.

This new tool joins the LOC’s vast digitized archive of photographs, prints and drawings, all of which are readily accessible through the LOC website. The Library provides a considerable amount of information on most of the digitized images, including everything from photo medium and genre to dates, photographers, location and image descriptions.

Via: PetaPixel

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Pixelmator Photo update adds AI-powered image upscaling tool, ML Super Resolution

22 Sep

Pixelmator, makers of the photo editing application Pixelmator Photo, has released Pixelmator Photo version 1.4. The new update includes ML Super Resolution, a new tool designed to enlarge low-resolution photos with a single tap. ML Super Resolution utilizes machine learning (hence the ‘ML’ in the name) and the processing power available in Apple iPad devices to enlarge photos, illustrations, paintings and designs while preserving and enhancing details, edges and textures.

ML Super Resolution was designed for the newly released iPad Air and was presented during Apple’s ‘Time Flies’ event last week. The app is powered by the new A14 Bionic chip and Pixelmator states that it is the first AI-powered image enlargement tool available on a mobile device.

To enlarge images, ML Super Resolution ‘creates a layered representation of the image that is over 100 channels deep, detecting features such as edges, patterns, textures, gradients, and colors.’ After this, the channels are upscaled individually and combined back into a single image. Pixelmator states that the process ‘requires up to 62 thousand times more processing power than traditional approaches,’ something that Pixelmator states is only possible on iPad thanks to recent advancements in iPad performance and the dedicated processor in the Apple Neural Engine.

Tomas Andrijauskas, lead developer of Pixelmator Photo, says, ‘The processing power of iPad has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last few years. With these advances, it is now possible to open up workflows that simply were not available in the past. One such workflow is using machine learning techniques to enlarge photos while retaining sharpness and enhancing intricate details.’

Pixelmator Photo 1.4 includes ML Super Resolution, a new AI-powered image upscaling feature. Image credit: Pixelmator

Of being able to show Pixelmator’s work during an Apple event, Andrijauskas continues, ‘Our team consists of 20 people and is based in a tiny Baltic country. So it is an incredible honor to be recognized by a company as respected and influential as Apple. It also shows that if you work hard to create powerful, beautiful, and easy-to-use products, your work will be recognized, no matter your location or size.’

In addition to the new ML Super Resolution tool, Pixelmator Photo version 1.4 includes a new split-screen view of original and edited images and support for the Apple Pencil’s double-tap gesture.

Pixelmator Photo 1.4 also includes a new before/after comparison tool. Image credit: Pixelmator

If you’d like to learn more about Pixelmator Photo and its RAW editing tools, check out the overview video below and head to the Pixelmator Photo website.

Pixelmator Photo 1.4 is available now from the App Store as a free update for existing users or for $ 7.99 USD for new customers. Pixelmator Photo requires iOS 11 or later and a compatible iPad device. A list of compatible devices can be found on the App Store product page.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Skylum announces LuminarAI, an AI-powered app designed to change how you edit photos

04 Sep

Skylum Software has increasingly utilized artificial intelligence in its editing software, including its flagship raw photo editing software, Luminar. Skylum has used AI for tasks such as automatically adjusting the color and exposure of an image and even replacing the entire sky in an image. With the newly-announced version of Luminar, aptly dubbed LuminarAI, Skylum has taken the implementation of AI even further.

Skylum has designed LuminarAI to automate as much of the photo editing process as possible while never removing the user from making creative decisions with their images. The idea is to streamline the process and make photo editing more accessible for beginners while offering even more powerful editing tools for experienced users. As Skylum puts it, LuminarAI uses artificial intelligence to remove ‘boring and complex tasks without sacrificing professional quality.’

Image credit: Skylum Software

Of LuminarAI, Skylum CPO Dima Sytnik says, ‘LuminarAI will bring an entirely new, non-conventional approach to the world of photo editing, focusing on the results instead of the process. We’ve designed LuminarAI from the ground up to change how people interact with their images. We’re really excited to see what LuminarAI can do for creatives everywhere.’

Artificial intelligence begins operating as soon as you select an image in LuminarAI. The software analyzes your image and recommends certain templates to help improve a specific image. Although AI is present throughout the entire process, you retain complete control over which edits are made and how they are applied.

LuminarAI can automatically crop and straighten your images via CompositionAI and automatically adjusts exposure and color via AccentAI, a feature longtime Luminar users will recognize. To add detail and texture to your image, LuminarAI includes StructureAI.

LuminarAI includes SkinAI to easily retouch skin and remove blemishes. There is also IrisAI, allowing the user to quickly enhance a subject’s eyes. Image credit: Skylum Software

The portrait retouching process includes numerous new AI-powered tools for photographers. If you’d like to change the shape or relative size of parts of the subject, you can utilize BodyAI and FaceAI to gently sculpt. If eyes are truly the window to the soul, you’ll want to use IrisAI to enhance a subject’s eyes. Skin retouching is often a time-consuming process in software such as Photoshop, but in LuminarAI, Skylum includes SkinAI to quickly remove imperfections and blemishes in the skin without making the subject look fake or unnatural.

Image credit: Skylum Software

Landscape photographers will be able to enhance the sky in their image with the existing Sky Enhancer feature, but there’s a new AtmosphereAI tool as well to add additional details to the sky. Of course, you will still be able to entirely replace the sky in your photo using SkyAI in LuminarAI. Within SkyAI, you can add warmth to the scene and even add rays of light.

LuminarAI includes numerous features aimed at enhancing landscape images. You can replace the sky, add rays of light, add warmth to the scene, enhance the sky and more. Image credit: Skylum Software

LuminarAI is releasing this holiday for macOS and Windows. The software will be available as both a standalone application and as a plug-in. To learn more about LuminarAI and to preorder via early-bird pricing, visit Skylum’s new LuminarAI page.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Microsoft unveils a new AI-powered tool for spotting deepfaked images and videos

03 Sep

On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced Video Authenticator, a new AI-powered tool that analyzes still images and videos to determine the likelihood that they feature digital manipulation. The tool is designed to address the growing problem of ‘deepfakes,’ a type of highly realistic manipulated content generated or modified by artificial intelligence systems.

Deepfake refers to images, videos and audio modified using AI tools. Though this technology can be used creatively, it is most associated with manipulating media to present something that didn’t happen in real life. This could include, for example, a video of a politician saying something they never said or doing something they never did.

Because these deepfakes are created using machine learning algorithms, the resulting content is typically very high quality and difficult (or impossible) for someone to discern from authentic media just by looking at it or listening to it. The solution to AI manipulation is another AI trained to spot the changes.

Microsoft has introduced Video Authenticator under its Defending Democracy Program, pointing out that dozens of ‘foreign influence campaigns’ targeting countries around the world have been identified in the past several years. These campaigns are intended to manipulate the public into certain beliefs or ideologies; others attempt to stir up debate and further polarize groups against each other.

Of 96 different campaigns identified (PDF) in part with support from Microsoft, 93% of them involved original content, which can be particularly difficult to detect. Microsoft explains that while ‘no single technology will solve the challenge of helping people decipher what is true and accurate,’ its Video Authenticator is an important tool that will help counteract disinformation by detecting subtle evidence of AI involvement in its creation.

Though Video Authenticator isn’t a long-term solution to what is inevitably an evolving technology, Microsoft explains that ‘in the short run, such as the upcoming U.S. election, advanced detection technologies can be a useful tool to help discerning users identify deepfakes.’

Video Authenticator works by analyzing every frame in a video, as well as still images, and assigning them a ‘percentage chance,’ also called a confidence score, that indicates its likelihood of having been manipulated. When analyzing videos, Video Authenticator presents users with a realtime percentage for each frame.

In a sample provided by Microsoft, the tool isn’t able to detect evidence of manipulation in every frame; some pass without triggering the system, while others may have enough greyscale elements, blending boundaries, subtle fading or other aspects to trigger the detection system.

Ultimately, Video Authenticator is just the start. Microsoft explains:

We expect that methods for generating synthetic media will continue to grow in sophistication. As all AI detection methods have rates of failure, we have to understand and be ready to respond to deepfakes that slip through detection methods. Thus, in the longer term, we must seek stronger methods for maintaining and certifying the authenticity of news articles and other media. There are few tools today to help assure readers that the media they’re seeing online came from a trusted source and that it wasn’t altered.

Microsoft isn’t making Video Authenticator available to the public in order to protect it against manipulation that may hamper the effort.

Video Authenticator is the latest example of a deep learning algorithm designed to counter the negative use of other AI algorithms. Last year, for example, Adobe Research and UC Berkeley introduced a method for detecting subtle face manipulations made using the Face Aware Liquify tool in Photoshop.

Conversely, we’ve also seen AI-based technologies that empower users to better protect themselves in this new digital landscape. Most recently, researchers with the University of Chicago SAND Lab released a free tool that uses AI to subtly ‘cloak’ images of one’s own face in order to poison facial recognition algorithms trained to recognize them.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Researchers release free AI-powered Fawkes image privacy tool for ‘cloaking’ faces

13 Aug

Researchers with the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab have detailed the development of a new tool called Fawkes that subtly alters images in a way that makes them unusable for facial recognition. The tool comes amid growing concerns about privacy and an editorial detailing the secret scraping of billions of online images to create facial recognition models.

Put simply, Fawkes is a cloaking tool that modifies images in ways imperceptible to the human eye. The idea is that anyone can download the tool, which has been made publicly available, to first cloak their images before posting them online. The name was inspired by Guy Fawkes, the mask of whom was popularized by the movie V for Vendetta.

The Fawkes algorithm doesn’t prevent a facial recognition algorithm from analyzing a face in a digital image — instead, it teaches the algorithm a ‘highly distorted version’ of what that person’s face looks like without triggering errors; it cannot, the researchers say, be ‘easily detected’ by the machines, either.

By feeding the algorithm these cloaked images, it subtly disrupts the machine’s attempt to learn that person’s face, making it less capable of identifying them when presented with uncloaked imagery. The researchers claim their cloaking algorithm is ‘100% effective’ against top-tier facial recognition models, including Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft Azure Face API.

As well, the team says their disruption algorithm has been ‘proven effective’ in many environments through extensive testing. The use of such technology would be far more subtle and difficult for authorities to prevent compared to more conventional concepts like face painting, IR-equipped glasses, distortion-causing patches or manual manipulation of one’s own images.

These conspicuous methods are known as ‘evasion attacks,’ whereas Fawkes and similar tools are referred to as ‘poison attacks.’ As the name implies, the method ‘poisons’ the data itself so that it ‘attacks’ deep learning models that attempt to utilize it, causing more widespread disruption to the overall model.

The researchers note that Fawkes is more sophisticated than a mere label attack, saying the goal of their utility is ‘to mislead rather than frustrate.’ Whereas a simple corruption of data in an image could make it possible for companies to detect and remove the images from their training model, the cloaked images imperceptibly ‘poison’ the model in a way that can’t be easily detected or removed.

As a result, the facial recognition model loses accuracy fairly quickly and its ability to detect that person in other images and real-time observation drops to a low level.

Yes, that’s McDreamy.

How does Fawkes achieve this? The researchers explain:

‘DNN models are trained to identify and extract (often hidden) features in input data and use them to perform classification. Yet their ability to identify features is easily disrupted by data poisoning attacks during model training, where small perturbations on training data with a particular label can shift the model’s view of what features uniquely identify …

But how do we determine what perturbations (we call them “cloaks”) to apply to [fictional example] Alice’s photos? An effective cloak would teach a face recognition model to associate Alice with erroneous features that are quite different from real features defining Alice. Intuitively, the more dissimilar or distinct these erroneous features are from the real Alice, the less likely the model will be able to recognize the real Alice.’

The goal is to discourage companies from scraping digital images from the Internet without permission and using them to create facial recognition models for unaware people, a huge privacy issue that has resulted in calls for stronger regulations, among other things. The researchers point specifically to the aforementioned NYT article, which details the work of a company called Clearview.ai.

According to the report, Clearview has scraped more than three billion images from a variety of online sources, including everything from financial app Venmo to obvious platforms like Facebook and less obvious ones like YouTube. The images are used to create facial recognition models for millions of people who are unaware of their inclusion in the system. The system is then sold to government agencies who can use it to identify people in videos and images.

Many experts have criticized Clearview.ai for its impact on privacy and apparent facilitation of a future in which the average person can be readily identified by anyone with the means to pay for access. Quite obviously, such tools could be used by oppressive governments to identify and target specific individuals, as well as more insidious uses like the constant surveillance of a population.

By using a method like Fawkes, individuals who possess only basic tech skills are given the ability to ‘poison’ the unauthorized facial recognition models trained specifically to recognize them. The researchers note that there are limitations to such technologies, however, making it tricky to sufficiently poison these systems.

One of these images has been cloaked using the Fawkes tool.

For example, the person may be able to cloak images they share of themselves online, but they may find it difficult to control images of themselves posted by others. Images posted by known associates like friends may make it possible for these companies to train their models, though it’s unclear whether there exists the ability to quickly located people in third-party images (for training purposes) in an automated fashion and at a mass scale.

Any entity that is able to gather enough images of the target could train a model sufficiently enough that a minority of cloaked images fed into it may be unable to substantially lower its accuracy. Individuals can attempt to mitigate this by sharing more cloaked images of themselves in identifiable ways and by taking other steps to reduce one’s uncloaked presence online, such as removing name tags from images, using ‘right to be forgotten’ laws and simply asking friends and family to refrain from sharing images of one’s self online.

Another limitation is that Fawkes — which has been made available to download for free Linux, macOS and Windows — only works on images. This means it is unable to offer cloaking for videos, which can be downloaded and parsed out into individual still frames. These frames could then be fed into a training model to help it learn to identify that person, something that becomes increasingly possible as consumer-tier camera technology offers widespread access to high-resolution and high-quality video recording capabilities.

Despite this limitation, Fawkes remains an excellent tool for the public, enabling the average person with access to a computer and the ability to click a couple of buttons to take more control over their privacy.

A full PDF of the Fawkes image-cloaking study can be found on the SAND Lab website here.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Adobe Photoshop Camera app released for Android and iOS, offering AI-powered ‘Lenses’

13 Jun

Adobe has launched its Photoshop Camera application for Android and iOS devices. The app, previewed last November, utilizes Adobe’s artificial intelligence technology, Sensei, to deliver highly-stylized and filters and camera effects in real-time as you capture images.

The Adobe Photoshop Camera app is designed to help users capture ‘gorgeous selfies, food and scenery shots, and more.’ The application includes numerous automatic image adjustment tools via a Magic Wand tool, such as portrait relighting and lens distortion correction.

The app includes different categories of ‘Lenses’, which act like filters: Portrait, Pop Art, Spectrum, filters inspired by Billie Eilish, Artful, Food, Scenery, Blue Skies and Reverie. Each Lens includes numerous filters, such as Blue Skies Lenses with different cloud formations. Users can also download additional Lenses created by various influential photographers and Instagram users.

Screenshot from Adobe Photoshop Camera app for iOS

Within the Photoshop Camera app, users can edit their captured images through a variety of basic editing tools. You can adjust shadow detail, highlight detail, clarity, vibrance, exposure, contrast, white level, black level and saturation. As mentioned earlier, there is also an automatic adjustment performed, which happens as soon as you view an image in your library. You can also tap a Photoshop Express button at the top of the display to take your image into the Photoshop Express app for additional and more in-depth adjustments.

In a hands-on with Photoshop Camera, the application worked well. The application made automatic adjustments and determined that the ‘Scenery Lens’ would be a good starting place for me to select from different filter options. I also tried out the ‘Artful’ lens, which was quickly applied to my image. In other photos, the app did a good job of picking out the sky, although unsurprisingly, its sky replacement is not as sophisticated nor as effective as what you find in Skylum’s Luminar software.

Speaking to The Verge, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis stated the goal of Photoshop Camera is to ‘bring the magic of Photoshop directly to your camera’s viewfinder.’ When Adobe introduced Photoshop Camera last fall, it notes the app’s role in broadening the appeal and overall platform strength of Adobe Creative Cloud, its subscription-based software ecosystem. Alluding to appealing to future Creative Cloud consumers, Adobe said, ‘We are committed to investing in accessible tools like Photoshop Camera built for the next generation of consumers and creatives.’

Adobe Photoshop Camera is available as a free download with in-app purchases for Android and iOS.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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