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Google’s latest Pixel 3 smartphone generation comes with the company’s new Night Sight feature that allows for the capture of well-exposed and clean images in near darkness, without using a tripod or flash. Today Google published a post on its Research Blog, explaining in detail thecomputational photography and machine learning techniques used by the feature and describing the challenges the development team had to overcome in order to capture the desired image results.
Night Sight builds on Google’s multi-frame-merging HDR+ mode that was first introduced in 2014, but takes things a few steps further, merging a larger number of frames and aiming to improve image quality in extremely low light levels between 3 lux and 0.3 lux.
One key difference between HDR+ and Night Sight are longer exposure times for individual frames, allowing for lower noise levels. HDR+ uses short exposures to provide a minimum frame rate in the viewfinder image and instant image capture using zero-shutter-lag technology. Night Sight waits until after you press the shutter button before capturing images which means users need to hold still for a short time after pressing the shutter but achieve much cleaner images.
The longer per-frame exposure times could also result in motion blur caused by handshake or to moving objects in the scene. This problem is solved by measuring motion in a scene and setting an exposure time that minimizes blur. Exposure times also vary based on a number of other factors, including whether the camera features OIS and the device motion detected by the gyroscope.
In addition to per-frame exposure, Night Sight also varies the number of frames that are captured and merged, 6 if the phone is on a tripod and up to 15 if it is handheld.
Frame alignment and merging are additional challenges that you can read all about in detail on the Google Research Blog. Our science editor Rishi Sanyal also had a closer look at Night Sight and the Pixel 3’s other computational imaging features in this article.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)