Computer Vision News - August 2022

16 AI Application camera is still huge. Photos look great on a small screen but blowing them up to 4k or 8k displays, massive TVs, or VR glasses with a wide field of view tells a different story. “ Our approach is to combine the hardware and software in a much more integrated way, ” Tom tells us. “ That’s hard to do in a large company where teams are siloed, but we can work across the stack in a start-up, integrating the hardware design and the software algorithms . There is much computational power available in smartphones now and some very advanced computational photography algorithms, but we didn’t know we had those when we designed the optics and the sensor in the camera module. Now, we can tailor the hardware design so that it’s combined with the software , and they work hand in hand together. That allows us to explore a new range of hardware designs that previously wouldn’t have been possible. ” Glass uses some of the latest developments in computational imaging, machine learning, and AI techniques to restore and enhance the images from the sensor. It is not just taking what the hardware Tom Bishop is the CTO of Glass Imaging, a start-up aiming to revolutionize the quality of cameras on smartphones. He speaks to us about its exciting plans for the future and takes us back to where it all began. Tom Bishop and Glass co-founder Ziv Attar worked at Apple for several years, watching smartphone camera trends while developing the iPhone camera’s portrait mode . They saw hardware improving and, more recently, the arrival of computational imaging in the form of multi-frame fusion methods that enhance the quality of the raw camera hardware. In the last couple of years, they noticed that quality was starting to plateau. The different smartphones on the market were all similar in many ways, with the main hardware improvement being to squeeze in bigger cameras. However, the difference in quality between what you get from a smartphone camera today and a professional DSLR or mirrorless Render showing a cutaway of a Glass Imaging folded camera module with mirror, anamorphic lens elements and sensor, as would be integrated into a smartphone.