AI to see in Total Darkness


     

Cameras—especially phone cameras—are terrible at taking pictures in the dark. The tiny image sensors in most modern cameras can only absorb a small amount of light, which often results in dark, grainy images.

To try to solve this problem without inventing a new image sensor, researchers at Intel and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlain taught an artificial intelligence algorithm how to take the data from darker images and reconstruct them so that they’re brighter and clearer, according to research published this month and to be presented in June at an industry conference.(To do that, you need to hold the camera extremely still for a few seconds or more, which is why it’s not practical in most picture-taking scenarios.)