OPPO says AI in phone cameras is here to stay

By Alex Choros

Last updated 11 December 2024

OPPO's Head of Product Management Arne Herkelmann says AI is an essential tool for improving photo quality beyond what phone hardware is capable of.

Speaking to media at the Find X8 Pro's global launch in late November, Herkelmann explained that using AI for mobile photography is nothing new.

"Computational photography has been around for a really long time," said Herkelmann. "Today this is called AI, back in the day it was called machine learning or simply computational photography. "

"As soon as you have more than one frame, HDR processing, stacking, image segmentation, that is all some sort of AI."

While computational photography may not be new, using generative AI in phone photography is an emerging trend. Google spearheaded this development with features that add new elements to photos, swap faces, and even composite people into group shots in its Pixel phones.

OPPO's approach to generative AI in photography has been a bit more restrained. The flagship AI camera feature on the Find X8 Pro feature is long-range zoom. Once you go past 10x magnification, it will use generative AI to enhance photos.

While testing shows that these images can still have hallmarks of generative AI (especially at magnifications like 60x), Herkelmann says the images are still all based on data from the phone's camera sensor. When discussing the tech, he compared phones to a DSLR.

"If you look at the DSLR, single, purpose, heavy, huge, battery hungry. All it does is take photos," said Herkelmann. "If you're not taking photos, you keep your DSLR at home."

"The smartphone is a multipurpose device, and we cannot put this kind of lens in a smartphone. We cannot say you cannot listen to music because we need the battery for the camera. The hardware is limited and with AI, with computational imaging, we can push that boundary."

"We do AI, we'll keep pushing that, while maintaining a natural look and feel"

There are boundaries OPPO doesn't want to cross, however. Herkelmann ruled out the idea of an OPPO phone deciding whether a photo is good or bad for the user, or automatically applying effects like the Find X8 Pro's new AI unblur. He gave the example of the birth of a child.

"You were super excited, you are at the hospital, you take your phone, take a picture, and because you are like pumped with adrenalin and whatever chemicals are going through the body, the picture is blurred," said Herkelmann.

"An AI would treat that picture as a bad picture because it's blurred, because it's out of focus, because it's just not a good photo. For you, that picture is the most important thing on earth. So how would you treat it? And I think we're not yet ready [to decide] if a photo is emotionally important to you whether it's technically a good photo or not. And maybe we don't even want to go there."

There are also technical challenges to having AI decide whether a photo is good or bad. The first issue is how you get user feedback - is deleting a sign a user didn't like a photo?

"The challenge is how does AI know why you deleted the picture," said Herkelmann. "It does know you deleted it, and it will find sense in the pictures you have deleted, but it still does not really understand why it is."

The second is getting sufficient training data for an AI to distinguish what is good or bad. Herkelmann said training would need to be done on device for privacy and security reasons, but this would take an impossibly long time.

"For AI training, a hundred selfies are not enough. So, to get to a point where the phone understands your perfect picture style? You have to use the phone for, I don't know, four or five years and take a thousand selfies each day."

Disclaimer: WhistleOut travelled to Bali for the global launch of the Find X8 series as a guest of OPPO.

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