In mid-2019, Huawei was accused of cheating with the photos that its top of the line at the time was able to take from the moon. Today, in 2023, Reddit users are making the same accusation regarding Samsung and its Ultra line smartphones.
Making a brief retrospective to remember the case of 2019, in that year, vast reports stated that Huawei would be using pre-existing images of the moon to superimpose the photos taken by P30 Pro users, giving the impression that the set of lenses in union with the built-in software they were able to capture the natural satellite with so much definition.
After this event, other companies ended up announcing their own “moon modes”, claiming that their devices did not use the same trick, being able to capture the star on their own merits – even provoking Huawei itself.
We have reached 2023. In a Reddit sub-forum dedicated to Android users and enthusiasts, user ibreakphotos claimed to have managed to prove that the photos taken of the moon with Space Zoom built into smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and its successors are forged .
Before trying to prove his point, the user even quotes the long article from the Input website, which previously tried to prove – without success – the untruthfulness of the photos taken from the moon with a Galaxy S21 Ultra, and a short from the famous channel MKHBD, which stated that no type of overlay was used to photograph the moon on the Galaxy S23 Ultra.
But the author of the Reddit post suggested another method to prove the photos were untrue. Something that had not been used until then. Check out the steps used by the user (if you want to replicate it on your own smartphone):
- First, he downloaded a high-resolution image of the moon from the internet. In this case, this one:
- Then, using an editing program, he resized this image to 170×170 pixels and applied a blur filter (Gaussian blur) to remove details from the image. At that moment the image looked like this:
With this sequence of steps, ibreakphotos ensured that the image of the moon, previously in high resolution, would not have its information restored. After all, the information would no longer be there, as the image was digitally blurred.
To finish off and finally prove his point, the user opened the 170×170 pixel blurred image of the moon full screen on his monitor, walked to the other side of his room, zoomed in on the image displayed on the screen using his Galaxy Ultra and took a photo.
The problem, however, was that following processing the image – where Samsung claims multiple exposures and different data from each frame are combined – the moon was displayed in detail. But how, if there was no data to combine and details to show?
On the left, the original image (enlarged). On the right, the image captured by the Galaxy Ultra.
The aforementioned capture and post-processing process can be seen in the video below, posted by the user himself.
On the part of his own interpretation, the user adds:
“Samsung is leveraging an AI (Artificial Intelligence) model to place craters and other details in places that were just a blurry mess. And I must emphasize: there is a big difference between additional processing making use of super-resolution, where frames are combined to recover details that would otherwise be lost, and this, where you have a specific AI model trained with a set of images from the moon”
Finally, taking into account the analyzes made, ibreakphotos concludes that the moon photos taken by Samsung are fake and that the marketing used by the company is misleading.
He also claims that the built-in algorithms include details where none exist (as is the case with what happens in the test) and even mentions an article published in the media where the company claims to use multiple frames and exposures to reach such good results – not just any kind overlay.
Posted less than a day ago, the thread started by ibreakphotos with the declarations and tests has already accumulated a few hundred comments and is already the point for several other discussions.
Some users of Samsung’s Ultra line smartphones claim in the comments that they have replicated the tests and achieved the same results, where the smartphone “saw” details where there were none, indicating the use of the overlay model with artificial intelligence.