Cornell University Develops Robot Photographer Using Reinforcement Learning - Clearpath Robotics

The technological standards of photography have dramatically increased over the last few years. While cell phones used to not even have photo capture capabilities, nowadays, it is becoming more and more expected that modern smartphones can take pictures of a quality close to that of a dedicated camera. The computer vision community has recently focused on assessing image aesthetics for image cropping and learning systems for capturing cinematographic videos. In other words, researchers are asking themselves if robots can understand and capture aesthetically pleasing imagery. However, these systems often focus on composing specific objects of interest into the photo by using composition heuristics, like the rule of thirds, and do not translate directly to a system that can capture well-composed photographs in general.