Comment by rapjr9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapjr9 | Hacker News Reader

This could improve privacy if all the processing remains internal, however there are several ways it could reduce privacy and create problems depending on what you do with the AI output. For example, the AI output could deny access to buildings if it detects a person is a child (good for industrial settings, not so good if you're a short adult) or it could deny access if it detects a person is white or female (bad for society). The video data might all be processed internally, but if the chip also has a video output the AI output could simply be used to decide what video to save. Or the AI output could trigger recording from an external video camera. So overall, the privacy aspects of this sensor seem pretty weak; it would have to be used in a properly designed system or else this privacy protection could be easily bypassed.

I've worked with similar systems that used local AI to process speech (to determine things like turn taking in conversations) and there was a claim that the system enhanced privacy because no speech was ever recorded, but in truth it would have been easy to compromise that privacy protection. If the ability to record or export video is not part of the sensor design, then it would be difficult for anyone to alter the chip to record video, but how do you verify that? The chip could have a secret "test" mode where it exports video and AI parameters for troubleshooting. You'd have to trust Sony, which might be reasonable in some circumstances, but not in others. The same is currently true for a variety of phones with "smart" features associated with the camera. It may seem like the phone will only unlock for you when it sees you, but what if it also secretly unlocks when presented with a specific QR code? How would you ever know?

Yep, I think the world would benefit much more if they just put the ability to do digital signatures in the CMOS. People want to do touchups, they just add a link to the original signed image in the EXIF do folks can take a look for themselves.

Definitely not going to stop state actors, but might help with some of the noise from doctored images/video.

unlikely to be useful unless you're shooting in RAW and need evidence that a specific sensor took the shot. phones and cameras do a lot of post processing before an image hits the disk and the original is discarded.

Eh, the purpose would be to demonstrate that a camera took the shot. The fact that it id’s which one specifically isn’t particularly material but might be a little useful in some circumstances.

You wouldn’t need to publish the unprocessed photo, just keep it in escrow.

Nothing stops you editing the photo, printing it out, and taking a photo of the printout.

The new photo would still get signed, and look original.

And if you did this in the right conditions, it wouldn't be possible to tell it was a photo of a print.

Since all the metadata (exposure time, shutter speed and so on) in the photo is signed as well, it would be possible to tell.

Sorry for this question but a little bit related to your field, why audio can't be improved through AI ?

Audio can be improved with AI.

There are lots of demos of AI separating human voice from background sounds.

I mean could you have a high quality mic on the phone/laptop just by using AI ? i.e Blue Yeti USB Mic

There is software for music professionals that will process audio to make it sound like it was recorded with any microphone you choose. It's not AI, just a mathematical convolution. However, the factors that make audio sound better are not just the microphone, most of them are the recording environment. This is why recording studios exist.

That said there are some types of processing that can improve audio quality. It's possible to remove some types of noise and to remove echoes from walls. You often need to know something about the room to do that though so there is no general "make it better" algorithm (yet).

One simple thing that sometimes helps is to adjust the equalization (increase or decrease gain at different frequencies), although if you use a normal equalizer this can add phase noise that makes the audio sound "muddy". A special kind of equalizer using FIR filters can adjust gains at different frequencies without altering the phase and results in a cleaner sounding adjustment.

There are "sonic enhancers" also, such as:

http://www.bbesound.com/products/sonic-maximizers/default.as...

which can add clarity to sound, though they don't work in all cases.

If you are mainly interested in intelligibility of voice there are algorithms for that which may destroy the musicalness of the sound, but make the speech easier to understand. Some of these things were first invented to improve the sound on the original telephones.

Probably the best way to improve sound is to improve the environment, often by adding sound absorbers on reflecting surfaces such as walls which gets rid of echoes. Even cheap microphones these days are pretty accurate at recording sound.

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