Monday, 1 April 2019

Why don't smartphone cameras correct pincushion distortion automatically?


I've previously asked why the GoPro doesn't automatically correct for the fisheye distortion, and this question is related, but different:


Given that smartphones have so much processing power nowadays (Nvidia GPUs, for instance), and that their pincushion distortion is easier to correct than the extremely wide-angle fish-eye lens in the GoPro, why don't smartphones automatically correct this distortion and the skew it produces in photos?


Below is a Sony Xperia Z5 photo illustrating the extreme distortion. The exercise ball is quite spherical in reality.


Sony Xperia Z5 pincushion distortion


Other smartphones don't fare much better.


Samsung Galaxy S5, iPhone 5S, Sony Xperia Z5, Nexus 5X pincushion distortion


Automatic distortion correction of the sort done in post=processing should be relatively fast because the camera parameters are fixed, and the code could be highly optimized in the camera firmware.


But even if correction were slow, it could be queued up for later, yet still automatic. Why isn't this done? Pictures are starting to look rather ridiculous in the last crop of wide-angle lens smartphones, and the problem applies pertinently to the one most common types of photos: the group picture.



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