Skip to content

Comment on Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera Appparent

Comments

One should remember that writing camera software that is agnostic to the hardware is technically hard

In this case, is it?

Their solution involves using burst mode, then taking those many pictures and turning them into 1 high quality image. Burst mode would simply output a bunch of .jpg images... couldn't you run the algorithm on those standardized images?

You get called dark current (thermal noise) on CMOS and CCD sensors, and the signal-to-noise ratio goes down as you decrease the exposure time. You see the effect when taking a low light photo, the graininess is from the SNR being very low while the noise is showing through. You can smooth this out quite a bit by combining burst photos (see Cortex Camera app) as the noise is random, but you always get better results with more light for each exposure.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.