Formula to take perfect selfies

A computer science doctoral candidate at the Stanford University has developed a formula for taking the perfect selfie using artificial intelligence (AI).

The best 100 selfies selected by the programme are all those of women, said the researchers.

Andrej Karpathy, a summer intern with Google DeepMind, has created an AI network that can rank millions of selfies, and work out what makes each successful, wired.com reported.



Karpathy collected two million selfies for his project, and ran them through a convolutional neural network.

He fed the system with some data about which selfies were "good" or "bad" -- depending on the number of likes they received, how many followers the user had and the number of tags on the image -- and tuned its filters to improve the data.

Once the AI had a million "good" and a million "bad" selfies, Karpathy gave the system 50,000 unseen selfies and had it rank them.



The resultant 100 best pictures offer some tips for taking the best selfie. For instance, if you are a woman, your face should occupy 1/3rd of the frame, cut off your forehead, wear your hair down (the longer the better), oversaturate your face and take the photo at an angle.

For men, the tips are slightly different. Include your head and shoulders, style your hair so it is combed up and backwards, oversaturate your face and take it straight on.

The things to avoid include making your head too big and group selfies.