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Google Photos Can Now Stabilize All Your Shaky Phone Camera Videos (theverge.com)

In early August, Google announced a feature for the Google Photos mobile app that would automatically stabilize videos in your camera roll. That feature is now rolling out via Photos v2.13 on Android. The Verge reports: A lot of flagship smartphones offer optical image stabilization when shooting video, a hardware feature that helps keep footage smooth. Others, like Google's Pixel, use software to try and stabilize jerky movements. Putting stabilization inside the Google Photos app could enhance results further if you're already working with hardware OIS, or improve recordings significantly if your phone lacks any means of steadying things out of the box. The stabilized video is cropped in a bit, as you might expect, and the original clip remains in your Photos library; there's no overwriting. Here's a side-by-side demo someone else made of the app's latest trick.

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  1. It is using parallax by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Informative
    Looks like it is using parallax to determine the depth and the pixels at "infinity". Surprised it took this long to develop parallax based image stabilization.

    One possible bug: If a moving object approaches the camera at the same bearing, parts of it would be marked as "inifinity" and create weird effects.

    Parallax based depth determination is one of the reasons for birds striking aircraft. Aircraft might escape with minor damage or a major disaster, but the bird almost always dies! It is in its interest to avoid hitting the plane. But birds have eyes on the side, not overlapping stereoscopic field of vision. The determine depth by parallax, they are constantly moving, and unchanging parts of the image on the retina are at infinity and changing parts are closer. That is why birds sitting on branches constantly cock their heads back and forth to get depth perception. When a bird approaches a plane such that the plane is at constant bearing, it things the plane is far way at inifinity.

    Would very much like to test this "app" by approaching the camera at a constant bearing to see what it does.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact