Google has always been really heavy on computational photography. It's why they stuck with a single camera on their flagship phones much longer than other brands did. They were able to use software smarts to fill in the gaps, and they did it pretty well.
Google is betting big on AI, and with that, it's not surprising that Google will be looking for a way to integrate AI into the photography experience on its smartphones. A recently spotted trademark filing points to something called Google RealFill, and from the sound of things, it could do a lot to improve the photo-taking experience.
Google RealFill Will Be Able To Use AI To Fix And Improve Photos On The Fly
Google has put a lot of its resources into AI being able to improve your daily life when using your smartphone, and it currently shows the most on the photography side of the business when you look at the new image editing features that the company has brought on.
Google RealFill looks set to be the next major AI feature coming to the editing board and in theory, it sounds pretty impressive. Currently, generative AI on Android devices can be used to fill in gaps after moving the subject of an image, or it can be used to fill in edges after straightening a photo. Basically, it is capable of predicting what should be where it is being instructed to add detail.
However, RealFill will take a different approach and one that allows for user input and makes it possible for users to point the AI in the direction it wants it to inpaint the rest of the image. According to Android Authority, you'll be able to feed RealFill with reference images, which do not necessarily need to be taking under precisely similar conditions.
It will then read the images with AI and expand a target image based on what it thinks should be added based on the references it was given, and it seems to do things quite accurately based on example images shown. At the moment, it is not the most accurate thing, but it is impressive in theory and is bound to keep getting upgraded.
Will Google RealFill Come To The Pixel Lineup Soon?
From the sound of things, RealFill doesn't sound like a consumer-focused solution. At least not yet. Personally, I see it as possible that Google RealFill could eventually be baked into Pixel cameras as a way of automatically augmenting pictures and making them better using reference photos from a huge dataset. However, having users manually input reference images doesn't seem very user-friendly. RealFill is also obviously going to need a lot of power behind it, so it's going to need to tie into the cloud instead of processing everything on-device.
The real question I have though, as someone who has dabbled in amateur photography with the smartphones I've had is: can I still proudly beat my chest and claim pictures as my own if some giant computer helped me out with filling in gaps and expanding the frame and all of that software magic?
I'm a bit of a purist, but I'm sure others might have different opinions on this, so I'd love to hear them in the comments below.
