Go App Analyzes Sharpness Levels
Programming Snapshot – Rating Image Sharpness in Go
© Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash
Which image in a series is the sharpest? Mike Schilli explores the depths of sharpness physics with homemade Go tools.
My relatively new smartphone usually takes exceptionally sharp pictures, but not always. Why is that? A smartphone camera does not just contain an image sensor but also a powerful AI brain that directs the camera's autofocus to what it thinks should be the focal point of the image.
Veteran photographers know that critical viewers of, say, animal photos expect the area around the eyes to be razor-sharp. The rest of the animal can appear slightly out of focus due to limited depth of field without detracting from the overall impression. Now, Apple and other smartphone camera manufacturers use all sorts of tricks to determine the area to focus on while conserving battery life as much as possible. This does not seem to work with reptiles like the one in Figure 1. No matter how many times I took photos of that cheeky little lizard on a hiking trail, not a single photo in the series turned out 100 percent sharp – in order to make the lizard's head "pop," as the pros say.
Figure 1: ChatGPT fails miserably at locating the eyes (left); Grok gets it correct the first time (right).
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