LG Announces Vision AI Camera For New 2018 V30 Smartphone

LG Electronics has officially announced that it’s next smartphone will arrive with a new AI camera feature. The company also confirmed that the new AI camera will be included in the “2018 version of the LG V30” and that it will be first shown off during Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 in Barcelona later this month.

LG calls its new software as Vision AI, which the company claims makes the camera on the V30 even smarter and easier to use. Vision AI will be able to automatically analyze objects and recommend the best shooting mode. Vision AI will have eight shooting modes: portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, flower, sunrise, sunset.

LG says that Vision AI will take into consideration the angle of view, color, reflections, backlighting and saturation levels while a users is pointing his or her LG V30 camera on an object. The software will be able to detect what the subject is being taken in the frame by analyzing images in its database. When it determines what the subject is, it will recommend the best camera setting to the user.

Another feature that LG’s Vision AI is capable of is providing users with shopping information through image recognitions. When a user points the camera to a specific object, Vision AI will be able to scan QR codes and start an image search or provide shopping options to buy that specific object online. Vision AI can also suggest other similar products that the user may find interesting.

LG is also using Vision AI to improve low-light photography. LG claims that Vision AI is able to automatically brighten dark environments “by a factor of two.” The company says that Vision AI measures the brightness of the image instead of measuring or analyzing the real-life lighting conditions. Additionally, LG will also be improving its Voice AI by adding nine new Google Assistant voice commands for the camera app. LG has listed down the new features on its official press release.

The new AI camera features that LG announced aren't entirely new. The object recognition and camera settings recommendation are similar to what Huawei introduced with the Mate 10 Pro, while the shopping feature is something that Google has already meade possible with its Pixel 2 smartphones, as pointed out by The Verge. What's interesting here is LG is taking a more careful approach on how it implements new AI technologies for its phones. Instead of making its own digital voice assistant (like Samsung with Bixby), LG is applying its AI tech to make its smartphone cameras better.

“As we communicated last month at CES, the future for LG lies in AI, not just hardware specs and processing speeds,” senior vice president and business unit leader for LG Electronics Mobile Ha Jeung-uk said. “Creating smarter smartphones will be our focus going forward and we are confident that consumers will appreciate the advanced user experience with the enhanced V30 that many have been asking and waiting for.”

Last week, IBTimes reported about a rumor that LG would be announcing the LG V30s during MWC 2018. It seems the V30s is the new 2018 V30 that LG mentioned in today’s announcement. Not much is known about the LG V30s, but rumors suggest that the handset will arrive with the same design as the original V30 and it will have 256GB of storage and possibly 6GB of RAM.