[Let's Talk Imaging] The Future is AI

Having spent more than a year on studying image processing using AI, particularly SVM and CNNs, during my Post Graduation dissertation work that included theory and programming both, it gave me a great opportunity to learn about the expanse of AI and image processing, which had always been a field of my interest.

The future of imaging surely lies with Artificial Intelligence or AI. The image/ scene recognition algorithms are like an asset now for mobile computing systems.

The earliest AI-like camera features were mainly limited to smile detection or gesture-based clicking, which were present in phones like those by Samsung (since I had used one, so I know. There may be many others too).

But, a couple of years back, in around 2018 when Huawei introduced AI in camera, with the introduction of dedicated hardware in the form of neural engines in the SOCs, AI made a dedicated breakthrough in smartphones. Though it was mainly restricted to cameras for assessing the scene and switching to a compatible mode, but it opened a lot of avenues to explore in this direction. This was further enhanced to make the modern phones more adaptive towards optimizing the smartphone's performance based on the usage, which has now become a core part of newer Android versions.

But when it comes to camera systems, these 2 years have taken a massive leap. The camera software that was having limited AI functionality then, has now become very much dependent on AI.

The features of scene detection have now upgraded to selecting the best shot from a plethora of images captured at once, or capturing the best night mode shot with maximum details, object detection, and even blurring the background.. We can see it working in Google Photos app which analyses every photo and categorizes it based on person, place, scene, occasion, etc.

Since the technology of Augmented Reality is now taking up pace, we will surely see better and out-of-the-box advancements for AI in smartphone cameras.

The modern systems where the world is connected though smartphones, imaging will play a crucial role in almost every field.

The prominent ones which I see in the near term and long term future are:

1. Online Shopping: instead of trying the clothes physically, AI-based models will enable trying the virtual clothes just via camera (like what lenskart does by allowing users to try frames).
2. Video Shooting: we can expect a more efficient EIS (electronic image stabilization) in near future, which might be at par, or even better than OIS (optical image stabilization).
3. Tele-medicine: though robotics is now taking the position of humans for complicated surgeries, some medical examinations do require human intervention for a perfect result as humanoids like Chitti are still a talk of distant future. We might see ultra-sound images, or MRIs and X-Rays getting more smartphone-friendly and allowing precise extraction of relevant data from patient reports just at the reach of the doctors' pockets.
4. Improved Security: phone security has now become of immense importance. With **** recognition becoming a common feature of security, we will be seeing much more improvements based on AI. The cameras of future smartphones might be able to detect minor **** features and expressions of the original owner and a doppelganger who might try to have an unauthorized access to someone's phone.
5. Lossless Imaging: algorithms like CNNs can very well re-construct images using deep learning mechanism. We will surely be seeing a better software optimization of images whose quality gets deteriorated to some reasons like digital zooming, shakes, etc.

Apart from these, since the languages like Python, R, Hadoop, etc, are becoming more and more programmer-friendly by addition of dedicated AI packages, it will give more flexibility to new-age developers to explore the ocean of features that can be added to smartphone imaging.