Implement optimal camera

[nicolas-raoul]

Nowadays a smartphone's default camera app often alter pictures to make them look more appealing:

• Artificial bokeh (example)
• Artificially saturated colors
• Fake content (example: Samsung pasting a pre-recorded image of the moon)
• AI "upscaling" that hallucinates details, for instance adding erroneous digits/letters to a street name sign.

From our point of view, I would say we usually prefer pictures without artificial bokeh, with "natural" colors, and with zero AI.

Would a no-frills camera (such as the open source OpenCamera 2.3 MiB) give us a better pictures?

If yes, how about embedding an optimal camera inside the app?

We could:

• make sure that this camera uses EXIF properly,
• include geolocalization by default (upon user's agreement),
• force the user to use the back camera (and not the selfie camera),
• suggest the user to turn their phone when they try to take a portrait mode picture,
• other ideas?

This is a lot of work.

if picture authenticity becomes a big problem in the future, this could be made the only option for new users to upload pictures.

[misaochan]

Does Commons truly prefer completely "natural" photos? I'm not an expert, but from what I can see of a lot of the featured images or WLM/WLE winners, it does look like there is some work done on the colors/saturation/etc.

[maskaravivek]

Is open camera's source code free to use? I would like to point out that I have used open camera for one of my personal projects and the code is very vast and looks difficult to understand. So making even a small change would be very difficult. If someone can confirm that the source code is under free to use license then I can publish the trimmed down version of the repo on GitHub to showcase how the code looks

[nicolas-raoul]

a lot of the featured images or WLM/WLE winners

I believe the winners are not representative of pictures that actually get used in Wikipedia/etc articles. But more importantly, such post-processing is performed manually by an expert. The problem I am suggesting addressing is automatic post-processing, which performs the same transformations for all images.

Is open camera's source code free to use?

Yes, it is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencamera/ under the GNU-GPLv3 license. If you have trimmed the source code, you should totally publish it, I would suggest on GitHub, be sure to write a README explaining where you found the source code and what changes you performed :-) It is a good thing to do, even if we end up not implementing this issue, or basing our work on a different camera.

By the way, this issue is very long-term, I am just launching the discussion :-)

[maskaravivek]

Great! Yes I was able to trim down the codebase to remove some advanced features and modernize the codebase. I will publish the repo on GitHub with a readme file once I come back from vacation.

[nicolas-raoul]

I asked at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Help_desk#Any_policy_about_(aggressive)_automatic_post-processing only one answer so far:

Not that we have a firm policy, but certainly I would prefer that someone start from the least automatic post-processing possible, and make any post-processing decisions themselves. - Jmabel ! talk 04:24, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

[nicolas-raoul]

@maskaravivek Sorry to bother you again but did you publish the trimmed down oqen Camera code, by any chance? 🙂

Meanwhile, here is the comparison of a detail of a building's picture, taken on the same Pixel 6 Pro by Open Camera and the Android stock camera. You can see that the Open Camera picture is much more trustable for Wikipedia's purpose. The stock camera hallucinates non-existent artefacts, distorts straight lines, hides some shapes:

Open Camera:

Stock camera: