Real-time Burst Photo Selection Using a Light-Head Adversarial Network

We present an automatic moment capture system that runs in real-time on mobile cameras. The system is designed to run in the viewfinder mode and capture a burst sequence of frames before and after the shutter is pressed. For each frame, the system predicts in real-time a “goodness” score, based on which the best moment in the burst can be selected immediately after the shutter is released, without any user interference. To solve the problem, we develop a highly efficient deep neural network ranking model, which implicitly learns a “latent relative attribute” space to capture subtle visual differences within a sequence of burst images. Then the overall goodness is computed as a linear aggregation of the goodnesses of all the latent attributes. The latent relative attributes and the aggregation function can be seamlessly integrated in one fully convolutional network and trained in an end-to-end fashion. To obtain a compact model which can run on mobile devices in real-time, we have explored and evaluated a wide range of network design choices, taking into account the constraints of model size, computational cost, and accuracy. Extensive studies show that the best frame predicted by our model hit users’ top-1 (out of 11 on average) choice for 64.1% cases and top-3 choices for 86.2% cases. Moreover, the model(only 0.47M Bytes) can run in real time on mobile devices, e.g. only 13ms on iPhone 7 for one frame prediction.