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This Chinese billionaire built AI to help Samsung and Huawei take better photos

Michael Deng, also known as Deng Hui, is the founder and CEO of ArcSoft -- an AI company with Samsung and Huawei among its clients. The firm provides algorithms and software for digital photography. He became a billionaire when ArcSoft landed on China’s Nasdaq-style Star Market in 2019.

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Deng became one of China’s three newest billionaires when his company posted dramatic gains on the country’s new Nasdaq-style Star Market. (Picture: ArcSoft)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

You’ve probably seen smartphones photos that look almost as good as if they were taken with professional camera gear. It’s more than just hardware. AI features are increasingly helping people snap beautiful pictures with just a tap on their smartphones.

In 1994, Michael Deng rounded up funds from friends and family to build software that would do just that. It uses visual AI technology to improve cameras not just for phones, but for the smart cars and smart homes of our future, too.

This was the start of a 25-year journey that took Deng from Silicon Valley to China, beginning with the founding of ArcSoft and culminating in an overnight leap to billionaire status.

Deng became one of China’s three newest billionaires when his company posted dramatic gains on the country’s new Nasdaq-style Star Market. (Picture: ArcSoft)
Deng became one of China’s three newest billionaires when his company posted dramatic gains on the country’s new Nasdaq-style Star Market. (Picture: ArcSoft)
The rise of smartphones means virtually everyone is carrying a pocket-sized camera everywhere they go. We’ve come to expect higher standards in our Instagram pictures, and handsets now come with more lenses than ever. But with a physical limit on how many cameras a 6-inch slab can carry, the next frontier to better phone photography seems to lie in AI.
Deng and his team shifted ArcSoft’s focus to mobile photography in 2004, with the hope of using computer vision technology to produce better results from tiny phone cameras. A professed photography enthusiast, Deng has a gallery on the company website dedicated to landscape and nature photography, including his own works.

One of the most common uses of AI in phone photography has to do with pictures featuring people. Apple, for instance, uses algorithms to quickly distinguish humans so the software can blur the background for portraits. Deng also believes that facial recognition serves a role in photography.

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