Xiaomi shares more details about the upcoming Civi phone

Xiaomi is now mere hours away from the official September 27 announcement event for a new Civi series of smartphones. We have already seen a few renders and teasers for at least one device from the new family and quite a few specs have been rumored.

Xiaomi Civi banner

Now Xiaomi has taken to Weibo once more with additional teasers, providing some extra info and reaffirming some of the things we already knew. Let's start with hardware first - the Snapdragon 778G chipset is now officially confirmed and so is the 4,500 mAh battery capacity, which the posters seem to claim will offer "the longest battery life on a Xiaomi phone this year". Then again, our translation might not be perfect.

Xiaomi Civi banner

Same goes for the other official banner, which appears to suggest three major software updates and three years of support for the Xiaomi Civi. Rounding-off the officially-confirmed info, we already knew some basic dimensions for the first Civi - it is going to be 71.5mm wide, 6.98mm thin and weigh 166 grams. Now we know that, apparently, the middle, presumably metal frame is going to be extremely thin, just 1.5mm and the chin under the display will measure just 2.25mm. Again, we hope our rough translations are accurate here.

Xiaomi Civi banner

Last, but not least, Xiaomi also officially shared a rather lengthy and extensive infographic explaining how its facial "beautification" filtering is going to work on the Civi. That term doesn't really do it justice, since as far as we managed to understand, Xiaomi used machine learning to train a sophisticated neural network to "re-depict" or re-construct facial features on a per-pixel level. The goal is to preserve the actual skin texture, instead of just destroying it.

Xiaomi Civi banner

Apparently, the whole system actually has more than one moving part. The main model was trained using the professional retouching work, done by photographers on photos of tens of thousands of women from different angles. The goal being for the neural network to try to mimic the actual retouching process, instead of a more-conventional approach of "plastering" over imperfections in isolation. During training, the first neural network was also kept in check by a second network, specifically trained to distinguish between the original images and the computer-generated images, during training.

Xiaomi Civi banner

It sounds like the feature will clearly be specifically geared towards more feminine facial features, which also makes us wonder just how specifically-targeted the neural network is in its current state. We'll just have to eventually test for ourselves how well it handles Caucasian features or darker complexions. Still, pretty interesting stuff.

By the way, we do also already know that the Xiaomi Civi will have a 32MP selfie camera, with autofocus. The attention to selfies and beautification comes as no surprise.

Xiaomi Civi banner

To round things off, some other not-officially-confirmed, but expected specs on the Civi include a 6.55" FullHD+ 120Hz display, 55W charging, 256GB of storage and MIUI 12.5.1. Also, Dolby Atmos enhancement, probably on top of a stereo speaker setup.

Source 1 (in Chinese) | Source 2 (in Chinese) | Source 3 (in Chinese) | Via