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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Five camera-quality problems that quietly break a vision model in production

#vision #production #robustness

A model that scored well on a clean training set met real phone-camera photos from actual users and the failure rate jumped. The demo used good lighting and steady hands; production doesn't.

What actually breaks it

  • Motion blur from a hand-held shot, especially in low light where exposure time increases.
  • Uneven lighting — a face half in shadow, a document photographed under a single overhead bulb.
  • Low resolution from an older or budget phone camera, or heavy compression from a messaging app.
  • Skewed or rotated framing — a document photographed at an angle rather than scanned flat.
  • Reflections and glare on glossy surfaces, ID cards and laminated documents especially.

The fix isn't a better model, it's better test data

Augment your training and evaluation data with exactly these degradations, deliberately, rather than only training on clean images. A model that's never seen blur will fail on blur no matter how good its architecture is.

See privacy by design for AI apps in India for a related production-readiness checklist.

About Pranjul Rathour

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting on stage in a blue polo, with his Annapurna demo video on the screen behind him
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour pitching with a microphone in front of a projector slide at CSJMU, Kanpur
Pitching at CSJMU, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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