Today we announced a new feature on Pixel 7/Pro and @GooglePhotos called "Unblur". It's the culmination of a year of intense work by our amazing teams. Here's a short thread about it
Last yr we brought two new editor functions to Google Photos: Denoise & Sharpen. These could improve the quality of most images that are mildly degraded. With Photo Unblur we raise the stakes in 2 ways:
First, we address blur & noise together w/ a single touch of a button.
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Second, we're addressing much more challenging scenarios where degradations are not so mild. For any photo, new or old, captured on any camera, Photo Unblur identifies and removes significant motion blur, noise, compression artifacts, and mild out-of-focus blur.
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Photo Unblur works to improve the quality of the 𝘄𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲 photo. And if faces are present in the photo, we make additional, more specific, improvements to faces on top of the whole-image enhancement.
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One of the fun things about Photo Unblur is that you can go back to your older pictures that may have been captured on legacy cameras or older mobile devices, or even scanned from film, and bring them back to life.
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It's also fun to go way back in time (like the 70s and 80s !) and enhance some iconic images like these photos of pioneering computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, and basketball legend Bill Russell.
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Recovery from blur & noise is a complex & long-standing problem in computational imaging. With Photo Unblur, we're bringing a practical, easy-to-use solution to a challenging technical problem; right to the palm of your hand
w/ @2ptmvd@navinsarmaphoto@sebarod & many others
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Bonus: Once you have a picture enhanced with #PhotoUnblur, applying other effects on top can have an even more dramatic effect. For instance, here I've also blurred the background and tweaked some color and contrast.
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Yesterday @ #MadeByGoogle we also announced the latest on the Super Res Zoom feature on #Pixel7Pro
It's a project my team's been involved in since '18. This year, our teams've made it so much more powerful. You can zoom up to 30x. Let me show you in a 🧵
Here's a neat trick to impress your friends
Let's say you have some curve with a random shape, possibly even self-intersecting. Can you measure its length?
This isn't just a parlor trick -- it has many practical applications. For example, the curve could be a strand of DNA 1/n
You can think of the curve as a collection of tiny segments of course. You can then measure each segment and add up the results.
OK, but you can go further and take the segments to be so small that they are almost like points. You can then add up the (red) "points".
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In practice, this is not easier though. So we need a mechanism for doing this more conveniently. One way to do it is to drop lines that intersect with the shape and count the number of intersections. You can do this with a mesh too.
I've posted a couple of dozen technical threads in the last two years that have been popular. Here they are in a thread of threads, very roughly organized into related themes.
Let's start w/ little-known classic: mean & median within a standard deviation
I grew up eating some amazing sandwiches like the Kalbas (beef Mortadella) & Sosis (fried sausage) in Tehran. These are a meal and a half.
There's a crazy variety of sandwiches around the world. I've come across some memorable ones🧵:
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Medianoche (Cuba):
Roast pork, ham, mustard, Swiss cheese, and pickles served on sweet bread. It is so named because of the sandwich's popularity as a staple served in Havana's night clubs right around or after midnight.
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Chip Butty (UK):
Filled with chips (thick-cut deep fried potato, not to be confused with thin-cut french fries), optionally eaten with condiments such as brown sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, or malt vinegar.