How did Facebook build auto-enhance for iOS?

Your iPhone’s camera might sometimes stink at taking a good, clear photo. But Facebook wants to help, introducing an auto-enhance feature for photos uploaded through the iOS app.

Facebook’s lead engineer explained in a new blog post how this technology came to be.

Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Brian Cabral, wrote about the feature:

At first blush it seems like an intractable problem: How do we recover light in the dynamic range missed by the camera to create a noise-free image? It turns out this is an age-old problem in photography that confronted the 20th century masters such as Ansel Adams and Ernst Haas.