WAILEI, Hawaii — Remi is a good boy — some might even argue a very good boy. But in spite of his undeniable charms, Remi suffers from the same shortcoming that plagues other dogs, regardless of breed: he doesn't always cooperate with photographers.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite introduced by Qualcomm this week includes a feature that allows Remi and other pets to be the very best that can be — an AI-enhanced pet suite feature that snaps photos of your furry friends whether they want to pose for you or not.
While a lot of the focus surround mobile chipsets centers around the performance, power efficiency and neural engine, there's more to the system-on-chip inside your phone than the CPU, GPU and neural processor. Mobile chipsets include an image signal processor — the AI ISP in the case of the Snapdragon 8 Elite — to extend the camera capabilities of your smartphone.
For the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm introduced a number of changes to its ISP, which boosts pixel throughput by 35% to capture 4.3 gigapixels per second. The Hexagon neural processor now has a direct line to the ISP, so it's able to make adjust to images live, without a loss of data. And Qualcomm says the ISP supports "limitless segmentation" — basically an image can be separated into more than 250 different layers so that each one can be optimized.
These improvements all seem to play a part in the AI-based pet capture features supported by the Snapdragon 8 Elite. And at its Snapdragon Summit this week, Qualcomm figured out a pretty clever way to show off those capabilities — a hotel conference room filled with Remi and other four-legged pals to melt the hardened hearts of seasoned tech reporters like this one, who attended the summit as Qualcomm's guest.
The AI pet photography tools work in three different ways. You can set the camera to activate when your pet looks directly at the lens, and it will take a quick burst of shots, where you can select the best one. The camera can also take a long burst of photos, with AI choosing the best shots based on parameters you've set.
The other AI-powered tool for pet photos comes in handy with action shots. Using the segmentation abilities of the Snapdragon 8 Elite's ISP, photo processing can sharpen and highlight a pet's fur so that those details aren't lost in the blur of action as your pet leaps, zooms and otherwise frolics. In Qualcomm's demo room, we saw Remi jump to catch a tennis ball, with the resulting shot highlighting the details on his fur as he fully extended himself to snap that ball out of the air.
It's up to the phone makers who use Qualcomm's silicon as to what features they choose to incorporate in the final versions of their handset. But given how much we love our pets — especially when it comes to taking photos of them — I can't imagine a situation where a phone maker using the Snapdragon 8 Elite in their devices wouldn't want to include these AI-based pet photo tools.
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