Qualcomm has explained how the recent Snapdragon processors improve the quality of low-light photos taken with smart devices, including the upcoming Snapdragon 820 that'll be housed in flagships next year.

Smartphone cameras have been improving rapidly over the past few years, particularly on high-end devices, which can capture crystal-clear shots in good lighting conditions. However, capturing high-quality photos in dark places remains a challenge for most handsets.

On an interesting note, some of the recently released smartphones that can take good-quality images are powered by Snapdragon processors, including Google's Nexus 5X and the LG G4 with the Snapdragon 808 as well as the Nexus 6P and the OnePlus 2 with the Snapdragon 810. Aside from the sheer amount of megapixels that their sensors can handle, Qualcomm is behind the superb low-light photos they can take.

Compared with professional camera sensors, the ones found in smartphones are considerably smaller, making them less capable of capturing light. Unlike other smartphone makers that chose to cram in higher megapixels on smaller sensors, Google opted for a bigger sensor, increasing the pixels of the cameras on its devices to 1.55 um.

"[A]ll too often, there's just not enough available light. When that's the case, those pixels will try to amp up their sensitivity to light - but there's a cost to this. On an audio amplifier, for example, the more you crank the volume beyond its limits, the more the audio will degrade," Francisco Cheng, staff manager of technical marketing at Qualcomm, says in the blog post.

According to Qualcomm, recent Snapdragon processors feature noise-reduction technology to improve low-light image and video quality, including a fast image signal processor to render noise-reduction application more quickly. Also, the processors use wavelet noise reduction as well as temporal noise reduction, which can determine the noisy areas in a photo and clean them up. On top of those factors, the processors implement local tone mapping, which brightens dark areas and retains the exposure without sacrificing the detail of the photos.

What's more, it seems that Qualcomm is going to take things up a notch with its upcoming Snapdragon 820 processor, further improving how Snapdragon-powered smartphones can capture low-light photos.

Take a peek at the 44-second video below to see Qualcomm's technologies in action.