from Hacker News

Programmatically create user avatars with Imgix face detection

by zacman85 on 6/19/15, 8:28 PM with 13 comments

• by slashink on 6/20/15, 1:19 AM

  Constantly impressed of what the imgix people are releasing. Everything from crazy rack builds to these slick API improvements.

• by MarkMc on 6/20/15, 7:01 AM

  Reading the headline I thought the program would produce stylised pics like this:

  http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/

  Question: is it possible to have a computer draw such images?

• by comex on 6/20/15, 12:25 AM

  Hmm... I don't use imgix, but what if a site using it wants to give the user the option to correct the crop? Since even a good algorithm won't do the right thing 100% of the time, it would seem sensible to give the user one of those 'zoom to crop' widgets with the starting position detected by the algorithm, but the described services sounds like it only gives you a static cropped image as output - it neither provides a widget itself nor supplies the parameters required to make one. (Or maybe it does and it's just somewhere else in the documentation?)

• by chromakode on 6/20/15, 4:42 AM

  This is a really cool service!

  One nitpick, though: in the live demo of the circular cropped face, it appears that the face is slightly off center, whereas in the first promo image of the article [1] it appears more zoomed out and perfectly centered. I tweaked the url parameters a bit to try to mimic the promo [2], but the weighting of the image feels a little off -- towards the top right. If the auto face detection doesn't produce perceptually centered images consistently, that is an important caveat, and the promo should reflect that.

  [1] https://assets.imgix.net/blog/avatar.jpg

  [2] https://assets.imgix.net/blog/woman-hat.jpg?w=200&h=200&fit=...

• by jand on 6/19/15, 11:52 PM

  I am a little bit unsure about this service. Although i find it technically highly appealing, the resulting privacy concerns are not to be ignored (personal opinion, tell me otherwise).

  Can somebody clarify how you validate the claimed 'Article 29 of Directive 95/46/EC'-compliance? It seems to me that this service somehow relies heavily on the well-behaviour of the clients.

• by kevin on 6/19/15, 10:24 PM

  This is awesome! I think faceindex and facepad are my new favorite parameters. Is there a reason you decided to make faceindex not zero-based?

  Also, will there be other options for "fit"? Like waldoarea?