Google Image Patent Highlights Potential of Consumer AI Tools

Google wants to help you get the perfect shot. 

The company filed a patent application for methods of “providing feedback for artificial intelligence-based image capture devices.” Google’s tech essentially embeds real-time AI-powered image analysis into smartphone or tablet cameras to help users take better photos. 

Google noted that taking self portraits or group photos can be difficult, even with selfie cameras and delay timers. “This can result in the captured image having suboptimal lighting effects and/or other undesirable image properties,” Google said.

Within a viewfinder, a group of machine learning models — including facial, pose, and expression-detection models — perform analysis on the image data before it’s actually captured in a photo. This analysis helps it come up with a “respective image quality indicator” that determines whether or not the frame “satisfies a photographic goal.” 

The frame may be judged on qualities such as lighting, blur, composition, or even the expression of the person being photographed. From this analysis, Google’s system would provide feedback to the user to help fix the photo. 

For example, some suggestions may include “hold the camera still,” “there’s not enough light,” “I don’t see any faces,” “try a different expression,” or “move camera farther away,” the filing noted. “The suggestions can be descriptive of a primary reason why the artificial intelligence is not capturing an image or otherwise providing the image with a relatively lower score.” 

Once those are satisfied, Google’s tech may automatically capture the photo itself. 

Though enterprise use cases for AI may stand to be a bit more lucrative than helping users take the perfect photo, AI tools like these normalize the tech for the average consumer, said Bob Rogers, Ph.D., the co-founder of BeeKeeperAI and CEO of Oii.ai. Doing so opens the floodgates for a far larger market than just tech professionals. 

“It creates a very nice entry into introducing AI technology that might then spread into other areas,” said Rogers. “There’s probably a push to make AI feel natural to people.” 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google aim to beef up its image tools with AI. The company launched a suite of tools called Magic Editor last year, and recently announced an AI photo editing tool on the Google Pixel 9 called “Reimagine,” which uses a generative model to make convincing (and outlandish) edits and changes to images, including adding car wrecks and drug paraphernalia, according to The Verge. 

“At times, some prompts can challenge these tools’ guardrails and we remain committed to continually enhancing and refining the safeguards we have in place,” Google spokesperson Alex Moriconi told The Verge.

Though guardrails may help prevent people from creating some risky and dangerous imagery, there has yet to be a real solution for the problem of hallucination — an issue Google’s Gemini image generator faced backlash for earlier this year. However, by introducing these tools to a broader audience, the company could gain access to “millions of sources of feedback” that’ll go a long way in tightening up the models, said Rogers. 

“[AI models] rely on feedback to very quickly adapt algorithms to improve and sharpen their accuracy,” said Rogers. “If millions of people are using something, and respond one out of every thousand times — especially when it’s an egregious error — you’re going to eventually get a lot of data on the things that matter most.”