Twitter Inc (TWTR)

[MissionIR]

Twitter Improves Image Cropping Process to Better Focus on Key Areas of Attention

http://ibn.fm/hdrz4

Ever post a photo to Twitter only to have it look odd and incomplete when it comes up in tweet timelines, maybe focused on the wrong area of the image?

That’s because Twitter crops images to improve display consistency, and thus far, they’ve been using face detection to focus the view on the key element when displaying a tweet image. But that process has some limitations – as explained by Twitter:

“While this is not an unreasonable heuristic, the approach has obvious limitations since not all images contain faces. Additionally, our face detector often missed faces and sometimes mistakenly detected faces when there were none. If no faces were found, we would focus the view on the center of the image. This could lead to awkwardly cropped preview images.”

That’s not great, particularly if you’re, say, a professional organization trying to put your best foot forward in your presentation.

But Twitter’s improving it – here’s a comparison of Twitter’s current (left) and new image cropping system, which uses neural networks to predict the most interesting part of the image.

Click the link for complete article.