Huawei are using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) in their smartphone processor to enable the camera to distinguish between cats and dogs which should appeal to cat owners who want to take the very best photographs of their cat.
The camera in their Mate 10 smartphone has an artificial brain! The manufacturer says that it has trained the camera-controlling algorithms with more than a hundred million pictures to enable the camera to recognise a huge variety of subject matter. It had to upgrade the processor. In fact they developed their own processor to enable the camera to do this. The new NPU chip allows the camera to recognise about 2000 images per minute. This is about twice the rate for an iPhone 8.
The camera can recognise the difference between cats and dogs partly because of the cat’s eyes. This is because the cat’s eye has a reflective layer behind the retina and therefore is more reflective than the eyes of a dog. The camera adjusts the sensitivity levels of the sensor (ISO number) in bright interior light and sunlight when taking a close-up of a cat.
Also, the camera alters the image sharpness to take into account the cat’s fur compared to a dog’s fur. Finally, as cat are normally smaller than dogs the camera adjusts the depth of field to make sure that the cat stands out better against the background.
No doubt the camera will appeal to some cat lovers and cat owners. Perhaps the company is tapping into the massive popularity of cats online and linking their smart phone camera to that popularity.
Huawei are a Chinese company and the world’s third bestselling smartphone maker. The company is slightly behind Apple in market share at 11.3% but they intend to overtake Apple before the end of 2019 and then eventually become the world leader by beating Samsung.
Source: BBC online.
