 |
One area where companies are still delivering significant improvements, however, is cameras. While this obviously varies depending on your manufacturer, companies like Samsung, LG, and Apple continue to deliver year-on-year improvements, including higher MP ratings, multiple cameras, improved sensors, and features like optical image stabilization.
There’s still a gap between DSLR and phone cameras, but it’s been narrowing for years. And if recent work from Intel and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is any proof, machine-learning can solve a problem that bedevils phone cameras to this day: low-light shots.
Don’t get me wrong, the low-light capabilities of modern smartphones are excellent compared with where we were just a few short years ago. But this is the sort of area where the difference between phones and a DSLR becomes apparent.
The gap between the two types of devices when shooting static shots outside is much smaller than the difference you’ll see when shooting in low light. The team built a machine learning engine by creating a data set of short exposure and long exposure low-light images (these were used for reference).