What’s the key to a wonderful selfie? Well, let us turn to science.
There are 3 important things that determine whether or not you have a successful selfie: a filter, your hair and proportions. Thanks to an image-recognizing deep neural network and the work by Andrej Karpathy, a computer science graduate student at Stanford University, we now know what goes into a good selfie.
Karpathy used Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) to judge whether or not a selfie was successful. ConvNets are used to recognized things and people in your pictures. Karparthy used this to try to classify which selfies are good and bad. He gave the Network a couple million selfies and wrote a script that would gather images that were tagged with #selfie. He assigned a couple of parameters and utilized proportions so that the result as as fair as could be. The results were binary: good or bad.
So what goes into a great #selfie? Here’s what Karpathy found:
- Be a woman. Sorry guys! Even controlling for followers-to-like ratio, women ranked higher than men.
- Your face should occupy about 1/3 of the image. Your face is slightly tilted and positioned in the top-center.
- Cut off your forehead. Apparently foreheads aren’t that cool.
- Show off your hair. It’s better if it runs down your shoulders.
- Put a filter on it. Black and white photos are in and oversaturating the lighting on the photo is too, apparently.
- Add a border. And not the cute christmas card borders, but rather the horizontal and vertical white borders (which helps contribute to the 1/3 proprotions!)
And the worst selfies had low lighting, had too much face, and had too many people.
How cool is that? Want to find out how good your #selfie is? Ask @deepselfie! I decided to ask…
hey @deepselfie, what do you think about this picture? pic.twitter.com/ZdP1qtIWT0
— elodie anne (@getELODofthis_) November 9, 2015
And he responded…
@getELODofthis_ looking at https://t.co/3irOg2S4iA your selfie gets a score of 52.9%. It’s a bit better than average.
— Selfie Bot (@deepselfie) November 9, 2015
Well, thanks Selfie Bot…! Obviously, I wasn’t impressed, so I took another selfie and re-asked.
Ok @deepselfie! How about this one? pic.twitter.com/ydao3OdOWs
— elodie anne (@getELODofthis_) November 9, 2015
And Selfie Bot responded with:
@getELODofthis_ looking at https://t.co/CZDWB8LpJR your selfie gets a score of 61.5%. I like it.
— Selfie Bot (@deepselfie) November 9, 2015
I guess as long as Selfie Bot likes it, then I’m good! Notice my percentage went higher with the cutting off the forehead and the filter addition! I still need to work up to a 100 percent though, if that’s even possible.
What do you collegiettes think about this science? Are you going to ask Selfie Bot what it thinks about your #selfie? Let us know!