User exposed to Samsung Space Zoom technology

A user of the American forum Reddit, under the pseudonym ibreakphotos, conducted a research that took advantage of the sensationalism. It has clearly shown that the Space Zoom technology implemented in Samsung flagships and used, among other things, to shoot the moon (and what kind of flagship can’t properly photograph the moon?) does not rely heavily on its capabilities. optical system and smartphone sensors, as in artificial intelligence algorithms.

The experiment itself is pretty simple. The user downloaded a high quality image of the moon from the internet, then reduced it to 170×170 pixels and blurred it, thus killing all the details. After that, he enlarged the picture four times, turned off the lights in the room, thereby imitating the night, showed the picture on his monitor and took a picture of such an artificial moon – using Space Zoom technology, of course. And then … a comparison of the two pictures follows: before and after.

It can be seen that the image (right) taken from the smartphone has details that were not and cannot be in the original image (left). Where did they come from?

ibreakphotos believes that while shooting the moon, the phone processes the image using artificial intelligence algorithms. Simply put, Samsung trained a neural network on hundreds (if not thousands) of images of the moon, and now the results of its AI work have been added to all images of the natural satellite. As a result, in pictures (for example, craters) – details appear that the phone could not capture in principle or capture in good quality.

Of course, the results of the test caused a rain of criticism towards Samsung. Maybe it would have been less if the company hadn’t introduced both Space Zoom and moon shooting with it, but that’s exactly what the Galaxy S23’s camera was launched even in pre-release teasers.