An AI learned to see in the dark

Cameras that can take usable photos in low light conditions are very useful but very expensive. A new paper presented at this year’s IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition shows that training an AI to do image processing on low-light photos taken with a normal camera can yield amazing results. Here’s an image taken with a Sony a7S II, a really good low-light camera, and then corrected in the traditional way:

The colors are off and there’s a ton of noise. Here’s the same image, corrected by the AI program:

Pretty good, right? The effective ISO on these images has to be 1,000,000 or more. A short video shows more of their results:

It would be great to see technology like this in smartphones in a year or two.

• artificial intelligence
• photography
• science
• video