A very interesting addition has been made to the Pixel 3’s camera app. In this up and coming age, an exciting feature involving detection of kissing was added to the Photobooth mode of Google camera 6.2 exclusive to the Pixel 3 users.
Earlier Photobooth mode supported detection of various expressions which included : tongues out, a smile, doing puffy cheeks, making a duck face/pouting and a surprised look . This was possible with the help of AI and ML which worked on user’s facial expressions while they faced the camera. It would automatically click a picture instead of getting the user to click the shutter when any of the above events were detected on the user’s face.
Now, Photobooth can also detect kissing and snap a photograph without users having to manually press the shutter. This announcement was made in a Google AI blog post.
The team has worked on various aspects for this particular feature present in Pixel 3’s Google camera 6.2. But it is not so easy to detect kissing as the users may not be facing the camera . The kissing detection feature is a variation of the Image Content Model trained for Google clips and is specifically fine-tuned to focus on kissing.
The blog post contained information in detail on how the team sort out to solve this complex problem .
The team has trained the algorithm according to how each frame is scored. More weight is given to the activity happening in the foreground than in the background. Also, a buffer is used to see if one of the next frames has a higher score than a previous one. That helps in only saving the highest-score frames.
This is just a gist of the complicated procedure involved to make this feature work. To use this detection facility added to the Photobooth, you need to be using Google camera 6.2 with Photobooth mode on.
If you are using an older version of the Pixel rather than the Pixel 3 or the Pixel 3 XL, then all you have to do to enjoy this feature is to download the modded GCam to get the photobooth.
