How does the Space Zoom Moon feature work?
It should be noted that Samsung’s flagship Galaxy phone line, which includes the Galaxy S23 Ultra, has a very high level of zoom for the back cameras, courtesy the periscope lens. The 3x and 10x telephoto cameras are made possible by a combination of digital zoom and Samsung’s AI Super Resolution technology. With 100x zoom levels, it can take pictures of things that are far away.
Redditor’s take on the Samsung SpaceZoom moon photo feature
In a post, the Redditor said that no one had been able to successfully demonstrate whether the Moon photos from the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and later models are real or fake until his post, citing prior reporting that they are real and are not fake.
To test the effect, the user downloaded a high-resolution image of the Moon. The image was then downscaled to a 170 by 170 resolution image, and a Gaussian blur was added to remove any remaining detail of the Moon’s surface. Then, he placed the low-resolution, hazy moon in full screen on his monitor, walked to the other side of his room, zoomed in on the simulated celestial object, and took a picture. After some processing, the smartphone produced an image of the Moon, but the surface had much more detail than the original.
According to the post, the user thinks Samsung is using AI models to add craters and other details to what was just a blurry mess. They also say it appears to be different from super-resolution processing, which uses multiple images to bring back detail that would otherwise have been lost.
AppleInsider cited the post as saying it was “an example of where you have a specific AI model trained on a set of images of the Moon, recognizing the Moon and slapping a Moon texture on it.”
The concept has been used throughout the mobile industry, so it remains to be seen whether this brief investigation will lead to further investigation into the use of AI in photography. Samsung has yet to comment on the issue, and we’ll update the story as soon as they do.
