Anyone would be supportive of judges being cautious over upscaling, which we know has the potential to introduce false information because it's doing inference and interpolation.
Zooming is another issue entirely.
Zooming is another issue entirely.
In the CSI "zoom and enhance", anything beyond the simplest forms of interpolation would be part of "enhance", which is to say, not part of "zoom".
And bilinear interpolation is as simple as you can get besides nearest neighbor, yet it still has the potential to introduce wrong information/cause artifacting. So even in the "CSI" sense, zooming can cause issues (unless you want to argue that only nearest neighbor is CSI 'zooming'? But then not even browsers do only CSI 'zooming').
It also only uses the available data in the image itself on which to work.
It's fundamentally different from neural network-driven inference and interpolation that attempts to fill in pixels using evidence from other images that the network has been trained on.
Courts have to deal with questions like this all the time and handle them well enough. Technology isn't magic, nor do we have to go down a rabbit hole on each point about what might be there rather than what is there.
So no, each time a given technique is used, the way it works has to be explained so that a decision based on facts of the case is made.
Courts have established mechanisms for handling technical questions around evidence. It's not like any of this is new.
In the end the iPad was not used. Instead a 4K TV was used, which ironically probably upscaled the image too.
Okay, so what's the issue then?
I would argue they DO NOT handle them well enough at all, and I have a feeling that if the person on trial had a different political affiliation you would also be claiming they do not.
Courts routinely get technology wrong, and use this the send innocent people to prison all the time. I would say the courts get technology related evidence wrong more than they do correct.
That's an ad hominem argument. In truth I don't care who's on trial, as the outcome of this specific trial is at this point an American culture war & politics issue that I'm uninterested in.
I am interested in how well courts handle technology and whether either prosecutors or defence attorneys can throw a wrench in proceedings with fanciful woo like "iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three dimensions and logarithms", and have that tolerated by judges who themselves are often technologically illiterate.
All of the other evidence was processed through forensics software, and displayed on Windows laptops. Then, at the last minute, the prosecutor asks to show this late-discovered evidence on an iPad. Watching the trial, that felt suspicious - why should this one piece of evidence be shown in a novel way?
It was being used to show the footage to the witness on the stand, in order for them to explain what’s shown on it. As has been done in American courts hundreds of times before.
Now sure, the witness and prosecution or defence could argue that a witness doesn’t need to make guesses about what they’re seeing on zoomed in low-quality footage when under cross-examination. That happens all the time, too.
What doesn’t happen every time is for iPads to be rejected for this purpose because of magical AI ‘logarithms’ inventing imagery.
https://twitter.com/frostycharacter/status/14597224299498782...
That means the jury will be able to see this as its own exhibit. (It may have been assigned two exhibit numbers.)
And I'd say it makes sense. Each additional processing step can change the image. For example, if one used the waifu2x algorithm to scale the image up, that would certainly be wrong.
Language is malleable, and so while it may be paranoid to question a feature labelled as zoom now, it's an open question how long that will last.
That's not how technical claims of that nature are normally handled.
The fantastical claim was from the defence. Onus should be on them to prove it, rather than making the prosecution prove a negative.
It's also likely that precedent testimony exists on using an iPad to zoom into an image or video in other cases.
And both the prosecutions and defense's claims were fantastical, unsubstantiated (beyond some incorrect 'common sense' handwaving) and wrong - so since it's the prosecution that wants to enter new evidence, it's perfectly fine to ask them to back to it up. This isn't 'proving a negative', it's just asking them to prove that what they said (that zooming doesn't change the evidence).
Both prosecutors and defence attorneys have used the same mechanism countless times in previous cases, without issue, because it is actually common sense that pinch to zoom is not going to substantively change what's shown in a video like that.
In this case the prosecution wanted to significantly zoom into very grainy footage to ask about an object a few pixels wide, on footage so grainy the prosecution couldn't identify the face of their own lead witness.
The defense raised the question regarding zooning altering or adding pixels and the judge said flatly he didn't know. All the prosecution had to do was bring in an expert on video to explain how zoom works - or have the expert do a non-fractional proportional zoom.
Everything is common sence untill it isn't.
Its common sence that you can't take over control of a car over the internet and kill everyone in it, that acess to a website that shows realtime location of half of US polulation would at least be properly protected, that a car's accelerator pedal doesn't cause random and unpredictable effect thanks to spagghetti code, that when Fujistsu charges a postman for theft, they are not just covering up bug in their tracking and accounting software.
Which is why both sides can ask the other side to substantiate their claims or provide expert testimony to justify their claims. If there is no issue, then the other side will be able to relatively easily find someone to testify to that or provide other evidence.
It's how the system is meant to work. If this is being used abusively, the judge will catch on soon enough.
That's because criminal law is purposefully biased in favor of the defense. If the prosecution wants to argue that they defendant appears to be pointing his gun at somebody when they zoom in on a photo with an ipad then they need to prove that the ipad's software can be trusted to do so reliably. If there are programs that can upscale images by creating new data then they need to prove that the photo app on their ipad is not one of those programs.
This should have been done with a program that is open to scrutiny (and ideally one that's open-source) so that the algorithm used to upscale the image is known. It's not enough to just assume that the ipad uses bilinear interpolation when there's a reasonable doubt that it could be using another algorithm.
And yes, it's so well understood that the prosecution had no idea of what's going on, claiming that it's "common sense" that it works just like a magnifying glass, which is simply wrong. Using bilinear (or bicubic) interpolation makes the edges of an image blurrier, especially when you're zooming in as much as they did on low-quality footage.
Aside from the confusion about logarithms, where I presume he meant algorithms, and the false claim about 3D, the defence was making a claim about artificial intelligence being used to upscale the footage. Which is inaccurate, and a specific claim being made that's unsupported by any evidence.
Funny enough, the same sort of question arose with regard to a crime scene image that was enlarged by the state's forensic lab, but a simple explanation of the mechanism used was deemed sufficient.
Your claim was that the judge's call is wrong because zooming doesn't actually do interpolation and has thus no potential to introduce wrong information. I've told you that zooming in this case does interpolate and that interpolation has the potential to go wrong.
With AI being used in ever more parts of technology, it is not surprising that a layperson wants to clarify if such technology is being applied here.
Apple has been advertising the usage of AI in dealing with photos ("Deep Fusion" of 2019 IIRC), so the suspicion is warranted.
Also, things like Deep Fusion are capture-time technologies, they don't alter the photo or video each time it's viewed. There's also already precedent in US courts for handling automatic enhancements applied to digital camera evidence.
We know that. A random old judge? Any random you pick on the street for a survey? Probably not. All they heard is something about AI and photos.