Artificial intelligence in Huawei cameras is just a buzzword or is it really AI

Since the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, Huawei has been promoting its devices as smartphones with artificial intelligence. It has even made it the main marketing message. And so the Mate 10 Pro has „the world's first processor based on artificial intelligence, its effects can be seen on the Full View screen”. Huawei P20 Pro has „an advanced photo system that shines with intelligence in the world of photography”.

Honor 10 – flagship brand Honor for 2018, which premiered in May – is also communicated in a similar way. The Honor brand belongs to Huawei, and the top smartphone is promoted with the slogan „Beauty in AI”. Meanwhile, like Huawei's flagships, its camera only recognizes and locates a variety of objects in the frame. Does this predispose to the term artificial intelligence? Do Huawei smartphones really have artificial intelligence or is it just a buzzword and marketing gimmick?

– The term artificial intelligence is readily used in marketing communications and can often actually be misleading. The very concept of artificial intelligence can be fuzzy and much depends on interpretation. Facial recognition based on detecting the layout of the nose, eyes and mouth can also be considered a form of AI. However, most such solutions do not use trained neural networks – comments GoMobi.pl Jan Milczek, senior data scientist at deepsense.ai. A few months ago deepsense.ai has achieved a breakthrough in artificial intelligence work. The Polish company's technology, which runs on Intel's system, has reduced the time it takes artificial intelligence to master classic Atari games from a week to about a day.

But let's focus on the specifics. Using a feature called Master AI, the Huawei P20 smartphone can identify 19 different scenes and objects in real time. Then Huawei technology regulates m.In. lighting parameters to make the photo as good as possible. Categories recognized include: cats, food, groups, nature colors, close-ups, night shots, text, greenery, portraits, dogs, fireworks, sky, flowers, scenes, documents, sunsets, snow, waterfalls, and beaches.

What does the competition have to say about it??

Honor 10 camera recognizes and locates a variety of objects in the frame. It uses Semantic Image Segmentation, which aims to determine what object each pixel of the image is a part of. In short – Honor's Semantic Image Segmentation recognizes and locates diverse objects such as. sky, plants, people and waterfall.

Samsung has similar technology in its top smartphones. Its cameras also recognize and process images. Apple's iPhone X, on the other hand, has it in FaceID. The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL from Google also have enhanced image recognition features. Samsung, neither Apple nor Google call it artificial intelligence though.

Preparing a neural network for image recognition requires a lot of computing power and hundreds of thousands of images in the database, on the basis of which the neural network learns to perform its tasks. In the case of the solutions used in cameras, these are pictures of people and landscapes, analyzed thousands of times by a neural network that has learned to distinguish a car from a person and a mountain from the sea. – A helpful tool for this purpose is Semantic Segmentation, a popular algorithm that our company also uses. In a nutshell, it consists in cutting a photo into smaller segments and analyzing them separately – says Jan Milczek.

So it is only and as far as the algorithm, and as I wrote in the summary of the year 2017, citing the opinions of experts from abroad, nowadays many companies use the statement that they have AI, while in reality they provide only services based on algorithms and on the so-called Decision Trees. Meanwhile, it was the labs of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft that proved the case of automation through artificial intelligence by applying the technology to their own products and services.

– An externally trained neural network can be used in smartphones, which correctly recognizes the image immediately. The processor present in popular smartphone models is enough to process a photo once. The network is likely to analyze a lower quality image in real time than the one captured later in the photo, so the camera parameters can be set live before the user even takes the photo. If the solution in the camera works like this, we can safely say that it is based on artificial intelligence – adds GoMobi expert.en.

AI a bit over the top

What about virtual assistants. Bixby in Samsung's Galaxy S8, S9 and Galaxy Note 8 flagships; Google Assistant in Google’s flagships or Siri in iPhones. This is true advanced artificial intelligence. – In Siri, or Google's assistant, the service connects to the cloud, the data is sent over the internet one way and the other, and the processing using artificial intelligence takes place in an external data center. That is why their capabilities are so impressive – explains Jan Milczek. – When taking pictures, there is no time for that. All parameters must be calculated before the user takes a picture.

According to Huawei, the AI technology in Honor 10 in real time identifies more than 500 scenes in 22 categories and adjusts the exposure parameters for each photo acting like a professional digital SLR camera. Thanks to advanced processors, the calculations are actually carried out on the device, i.e. directly on the smartphone. It is done using the HiSilicon Kirin 970 processor, which all flagships from the Huawei stable have.

Thanks to the technology used Huawei – especially the model P20 Pro – beats in tests the cameras in smartphones of competitors. However, the Chinese company does not have a virtual assistant. He wants to have it as soon as possible, because in other top smartphones they are already present. Early media reports suggest that the assistant will be called HiAssistant.

For this reason, so strenuously Huawei, in my opinion a bit overstated, promotes its flagships as devices with artificial intelligence.