Virtual Portraitist

Smart photography carries the promise of quality improvement and functionality extension in making aesthetically appealing pictures. In this article, we focus on self-portrait photographs and introduce new methods that guide a user in how to best pose while taking a selfie. While most of the current solutions use a post processing procedure to beautify a picture, the developed tool enables a novel function of recommending a good look before the photo is captured. Given an input face image, the tool automatically estimates the pose-based aesthetic score, finds the most attractive angle of the face, and suggests how the pose should be adjusted. The recommendation results are determined adaptively to the appearance and initial pose of the input face. We apply a data mining approach to find distinctive, frequent itemsets and association rules from online profile pictures, upon which the aesthetic estimation and pose recommendation methods are developed. A simulated and a real image set are used for experimental evaluation. The results show the proposed aesthetic estimation method can effectively select user-favorable photos. Moreover, the recommendation performance for the vertical adjustment is moderately related to the degree of conformity among the professional photographers’ recommendations. This study echoes the trend of instant photo sharing, in which a user takes a picture and then immediately shares it on a social network without engaging in tedious editing.