Google AI Blog: Google Clips

In the Google AI blog:

A means of capturing data for AI learning input?

Automatic Photography with Google Clips
Posted by Aseem Agarwala, Research Scientist, Clips Content Team Lead

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson

The last few years have witnessed a Cambrian-like explosion in AI, with deep learning methods enabling computer vision algorithms to recognize many of the elements of a good photograph: people, smiles, pets, sunsets, famous landmarks and more. But, despite these recent advancements, automatic photography remains a very challenging problem. Can a camera capture a great moment automatically?

Recently, we released Google Clips, a new, hands-free camera that automatically captures interesting moments in your life. We designed Google Clips around three important principles: 

We wanted all computations to be performed on-device. In addition to extending battery life and reducing latency, on-device processing means that none of your clips leave the device unless you decide to save or share them, which is a key privacy control.

We wanted the device to capture short videos, rather than single photographs. Moments with motion can be more poignant and true-to-memory, and it is often easier to shoot a video around a compelling moment than it is to capture a perfect, single instant in time.

We wanted to focus on capturing candid moments of people and pets, rather than the more abstract and subjective problem of capturing artistic images. That is, we did not attempt to teach Clips to think about composition, color balance, light, etc.; instead, Clips focuses on selecting ranges of time containing people and animals doing interesting activities.  ..... "