Google RealFill Might Be The Next Major AI Photography Feature

For the last 18 months, Google has been very aggressive when it comes to promoting gen AI. Be it the Magic Editor or any other feature, the company is very diligent in demonstrating the tech. Now, it seems Google’s next AI-enabled photo feature could be dubbed as RealFill.

Google has discreetly filed a trademark for the new tech recently. The trademark was filed through the European Union Intellectual Property Office and the US Patent and Trade Office.

The trademark brief reads: “Providing non-downloadable software using artificial intelligence (AI) for inpainting images; Providing online non-downloadable software for creating generative models.” 

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How Will Google’s RealFill Feature Work

It turns out that RealFill tech was actually announced last year in a paper and website by researchers from Google and Cornell University. The paper, titled “Reference-Driven Generation for Authentic Image Completion,” talks about a method to accurately expand and inpaint images.

RealFill is capable of accurately expanding and inpainting an existing image by using up to five images as a reference. It’s not necessary that these reference images align with the target image, and can be taken with varying viewpoints. Camera apertures, or image styles.

First, the team fine-tunes a personalized gen AI model on the target images. This process allows the model to learn the style, lighting, and contents of the scene in the images. One notable downside of the tech is that it is required to undergo a “gradient-based fine-tuning process” on input images, making the process slow. 

It could be tough to recover the scene in the final output if the reference images and the target images have a lot of differences. Moreover, the researchers found that the text could come in the way of using the technique.

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Is The RealFill Feature Coming To Pixel 9 or Google Photos?

Filed patents or trademarks do not guarantee that the new feature will be released. However, if it launches, it could come to future Pixel series phones of Google Photos if the company plans to launch it for commercial purposes. There’s a possibility that the feature would come as a cloud-based feature instead of an on-device feature, especially since the team noted that the fine-tuning process is slow.

Existing photo expansion and inpainting solutions are nowhere close to being perfect. However, a solution that uses reference images could still make for much better outputs. It also means users can go back to old snaps in their Google Photos library and produce better images.

Either way, this feature could bring up more questions about the definition of an image, much like the company’s Magic Editor.