What if your camera were even smarter? Meet Arsenal, your new AI-equipped photo assistant

 

 

Modern cameras offer great imaging technology, but they don’t always help you capture the perfect photo. Enter Arsenal, an “intelligent camera assistant.”

Arsenal is a device you attach to your camera’s hot shoe that allows you to control your camera wirelessly from up to 100 feet away using a dedicated Android or iOS app. Arsenal offers built-in intelligent HDR, focus stacking and time lapse functionality, totally automating the processes and creating files right in your camera.

Arsenal is designed to let you focus on the composition of your image while it does a lot of the difficult, technical work associated with capturing sharp, well-exposed images. The “world’s first AI photography assistant” finds the right settings for your shot. The AI searches thousands of images in its database to find the ones relevant to your current composition. Arsenal then suggests camera settings and fine-tunes them based on 18 different factors, such as subject motion, diffraction, noise, coma and more. Arsenal can detect vibration, for example, using its built-in accelerometer and calculate a minimum shutter speed you need based on the recognized vibration and your lens’s focal length.

Further, Arsenal can even read data from your camera’s sensor to determine the dynamic range in the scene and suggest a maximum ISO you can use before you lose important shadow and highlight detail. Arsenal does the same thing with color accuracy and your ISO. What about focal distance? By using the Focus Screen in the application, you can set the subject (or subjects) you want in focus and Arsenal will determine a modified hyperfocal distance based on your selected areas to get as much in focus as possible. Arsenal also includes a lens sharpness database and can help you choose the sharpest aperture for your particular lens. 

You can read much more about its artificial intelligence capabilities in this blog post. Naturally there will be settings that compete, so the software has been optimized to balance different constraints as best as possible.

Arsenal is clearly an ambitious project, but it has so far garnered extensive support from backers on Kickstarter. The project has already more than doubled its $50,000 goal with nearly a month left in the campaign. If you’d like to learn more about Arsenal, click here. There is still one more Early Bird pledge left, which allows you to purchase Arsenal for $125, a 50 percent savings off the expected retail price. The next pledge category is $150, which is still a nice discount. In both cases, the Arsenal is expected to be delivered to early pledgers in January 2018.

(Via Sony Alpha Rumors)