Google Engineer Teaches a Smartphone to Take Good Quality Photographs in Bad Lighting Conditions

Industry April, 28 2017 Glib Savchenko

Florian Kainz used Google Pixel and Google Nexus 6P smartphones to take photographs that are no worse than taken by DSLR cameras.

Florian Kainz, who works as an engineer on Google Daydream project, published an article about his experiment where he tried to improve the photographic abilities of a smartphone in bad lighting conditions.

Shooting at night is one of the weakest points of mobile cameras. Having no ability to change the hardware, Kainz tried to solve the problem by making changes on the software side. His main idea was in taking a large number of photographs of the same scene, and then delete digital noise from the images. The application that he created took up to 64 pictures in a short period of time, after that it analyzed the images for unnecessary movements, cleared from noise, and combined into one photograph.

As a result, Kainz received images of an extremely high quality, which is atypical for mobile cameras. He published some of the photographs on his blog.