The camera app captures multiple shots at varying exposures and stitches them together for a sharper image.
Irrespective of how much a manufacturer claims to inject advanced camera capabilities to the smartphone, for serious photography enthusiasts, low-light results always tend to fall a notch short as compared to the professional cameras. Google researcher, Florian Kainz, who is part of the company’s Daydream team, has come up with a simple solution to address the issue of sub-par smartphone camera results in low light conditions – an app.
While smartphones offer the much-needed convenience of capturing the world around but there is still a long way for them to come close to a shot from a DSLR camera. To find out how much a smartphone’s camera can be exploited to its fullest potential for low-light conditions, Kainz aimed to capture multiple shots of a low-light scene and stitch them together into one final image. For this, he put to use the camera prowess of the Google Pixel and Nexus 6P which support exposure times of 4 seconds and 2 seconds respectively. ALSO READ: Ok Google, your Pixel smartphones are impressive
Kainz wrote a simple Android camera app with manual control over exposure time, ISO and focus distance. The solution builds on the work of another Google researcher, Marc Levoy, and his experimental SeeInTheDark app. When the shutter button is pressed the app waits a few seconds and then records up to 64 frames with the selected settings. The app saves the raw frames captured from the sensor as DNG files, which can later be downloaded onto a PC for processing. ALSO READ: Google Pixel, Pixel XL use camera software originally developed for Google Glass
To test the app, Kainz captured landscape on a full moon night – where the light was still in abundance, along with one instance where the light was even less and the results were equally brilliant post processing. However, the highest point where the app simply caused the jaws to drop was when the Pixel phone was able to capture a recognizable image of the Milky Way! The app combined 64 two-second exposures taken at ISO 12800 and 64 corresponding black frames to produce an image where constellations Scorpio and Sagittarius are clearly visible. Here are some samples.
Kainz notes that with the Pixel, there is a limitation to exposure times as the camera cannot handle over two seconds. However, if this restriction is removed, it will be possible to expose individual frames for eight to ten seconds which will result in much crisper results. You can check out more pictures processed using the technique here. ALSO READ: This marvellous Iron Man suit by a British Inventor is functional and will let you zoom around the backyard