Picture the scene: You attend an important work call, fresh-faced and ready to confidently deliver your signature “nothing from me” line, only to discover that the light (or lack thereof) in your work office from house is gone. You sound less like a serious businessman and more like a sleazy Omegle user from 2010. Don't worry, we've all been there.
Fortunately, Qualcomm knows we've all been there, which is why the American semiconductor giant has seen fit to equip its recently announced Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset. with an AI-powered real-time lighting tool that could banish terrible video call lighting to the annals of internet history.
AI Portrait Video Re-lighting allows you to add a virtual, moving light source that maps to the contours of your face to better illuminate you in heavily backlit environments. This lighting can be adjusted manually or you can let your phone's AI do the work for you, and the entire process takes place on the device, with no additional latency. Wait a minute, did Qualcomm just turn off the ring light?
Qualcomm unveiled the new tool at Snapdragon Summit 2024, demonstrating its potential on an unnamed fictional phone, although we may see the AI Portrait Video Re-lighting feature (albeit under a different name) on some of the best Android phones of 2025: think of the highly rumored Samsung Galaxy S25, OnePlus 13, Xiaomi 15 Ultra, etc.
This is because all of those upcoming flagship phones are expected to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, meaning their respective OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) will have the option to implement this new AI technology as they see fit.
In fact, as Qualcomm Senior Director of Product Management Judd Heape confirmed to TechRadar in a roundtable interview at the Snapdragon Summit (with reference to Unlimited Segmentation, another Snapdragon 8 Elite-specific camera feature) : “Unlimited segmentation is built into the [Snapdragon 8 Elite] Camera Frame: Ships with the basic camera. Therefore, it will be up to the OEMs how they integrate it. [and other AI features] in the main products.
Limitless Segmentation segments an image into over 250 layers, optimizing and enhancing each layer (including faces, hair, clothing, objects and backgrounds) in the process, so presumably Qualcomm's AI Portrait Video Re-lighting technology could also be applied to still portraits. . Could we see a “Qualcomm Portraits” tag added to images taken with the best Samsung phones in the near future? It's certainly a possibility.
In any case, we're glad to see Qualcomm using the power of its Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset to develop practical generative AI tools like this. Sure, custom emoji makers are great, but they won't help you save face when the lighting on your video call just isn't right.