Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123389

Points: 234

# Comments: 122

I photoshopped one moon next to another (to see if one moon would get the AI treatment, while another would not), and managed to coax the AI to do exactly that.

This is the image that I used, which contains 2 blurred moons: https://imgur.com/kMv1XAx

I replicated my original setup, shot the monitor from across the room, and got this: https://imgur.com/RSHAz1l

As you can see, one moon got the "AI enhancement", while the other one shows what was actually visible to the sensor - a blurry mess

I think this settles it.

That being said, there were a few comments on here about gaussian blur and deconvolution, which I would like to tackle. First, I need to mention that I do not have an maths/engineering background. I am familiar with some concepts, as I've used deconvolution via FFT several years ago during my PhD, but while I am aware of the process, I don't know all the details. I certainly didn't know that the image that was gaussian blurred could be sharpened perfectly - I will have to look into that. In fact, I used gaussian blur to redact some private information (like in screenshots), and it's very helpful to know if I haven't redacted anything and the data is recoverable. Wow.

I would love to learn more about the types of blur that cannot be deconvoluted.

However, please have in mind that in my experiment:

1) I also downsampled the image to 170x170, which, as far as I know, is an information-destructive process

2) The camera doesn't have the access to my original gaussian blurred image, but that image + whatever blur and distortion was introduced when I was taking the photo from far away, (whatever algo they are using doesn't have access to the original blurred image to run a perfect deconvolution on)

3) Lastly, I also clipped the highlights in the last example, which is also destructive (non-reversible), and the AI hallucinated details there as well

So I am comfortable saying that it's not deconvolution which "unblurs" the image and sharpens the details, but what I said - an AI model trained on moon images that uses image matching and a neural network to fill in the data.

Thank you again for your engagement and your thoughtful comments, I really appreciate them, and have learned a lot just by reading them!