Samsung addresses moon photo controversy after 'fake' jibes

Samsung has admitted to using AI to improve photos of the moon for Galaxy S-Series users, following a well-shared Reddit post accusing the company of faking the images.

Considering Samsung had kind of addressed the issue and made a similar admission (albeit in Korean) before, this was a bit of a storm in a cup of tea. However, some users wondered if their photos were essentially superimposed on an AI image of the moon.

In a blog post, Samsung explains in detail how detailed moon shots are achieved. It essentially combines its super resolution camera technology with advanced artificial intelligence to improve detail on the moon's surface, but there's a lot more in between.

The company said the Scene Optimizer feature was able to recognize the moon as a specific object from the Galaxy S21. This in itself works via AI. While the Super Resolution function is automatically activated at 25x zoom.

Samsung says moon mode takes more than 10 frames to help capture more detail, and those frames can be combined to improve clarity. Samsung's Zoom Lock feature also helps create the most stable images possible, according to the company, while there are also brightness optimizations.

That's where AI-powered "detail enhancement" comes in, which she explains in the blog post, but rails against criticism that she used "a photo of the moon deliberately edited to be fuzzy”.

"After multi-frame processing, the Galaxy Camera further leverages Scene Optimizer's deep learning-based AI detail enhancement engine to effectively remove remaining noise and further enhance image detail. says Samsung in the blog post.

Samsung says it will continue to work to improve the Scene Optimization feature to reduce potential confusion over images taken on its phones and actual images of the moon. So basically, yes, that detail is somewhat contrived, but there's a lot of work to be done to make these photos look as authentic as possible.