
Show HN: Cornea AI – Using Deep Learning to Predict Photo Popularity - parths
https://cornea.ai/
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mrleiter
This is very interesting. I cannot stop thinking that this is the logical next
step of social media, or if you want to make the circle a bit bigger -
photography; or even bigger - self representation.

People strive to be perceived in a certain light and be approved for this
egocentric perception of oneself. First it started with favorable pictures
that you deemed fitting. Then along came filters, which "enhance" certain
features of your pictures. Now Cornea AI - which guesses the approval rate of
your pictures.

I somehow find it beautiful. But then again I feel a bit sad that humans have
come thus far...

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parths
You summarised our vision very well, we want to democratise creativity so you
never have to guess what will work on social media

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jklein11
I'm sorry but what does this have to do with democratization?

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have_faith
Could you plug this into one of those image generation algorithms and generate
a potentially popular image from scratch?

Side note: I can imagine high speed ad networks in the future using this to
deliver custom images in real time to users based on their profiles. Tweaked
of course based on the interests of their extended network and the likelihood
of going viral within that network.

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muktabh
Hi, That can be done, but image generation algorithms require a bit more time
to be good enough for such a thing. Two major bottlenecks (I am assuming you
are talking about GANs) are: 1\. The algorithms are still not too good for hi
res images. 2\. The algorithms work very well on images where fine grained
features are not that important. (For example images of nature), but they
introduce unwanted features otherwise (Eyes looking other ways etc.). We might
be all ready by next ICLR/NIPS though, cannot say.

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pacificleo11
Very interesting. Can you please talk about the algorithm you use to predict
the popularity score .

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parths
A neural network has been trained to differentiate between popular and non-
popular images and give like scores. This network was optimised to understand
the features that made a photo popular on social media. Part of the work was
inspired by Karpathy's blog on selfie
([http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/)).
However, our algorithm works on different type of images and not just selfies.

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cabalamat
Maybe someone should do an app that writes facebook posts for you, predicting
what will be the most popular.

Or Reddit -- since the populaity of all Reddit posts is known it would be a
good training set for such an AI :-)

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parths
Absolutely! With visual content being predicted for popularity, a model can be
made which produces quality content based on the training data of existing
popular content from different sources.

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aegon_buddy
Interesting technology, not much of a photo person but would like to know how
are you building the dataset considering there are so many different types of
images that can trend at any point of time?

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mongodude
Score seems to work on some images but did not work on my dog's photo - how do
you guys evaluate the accuracy?

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parths
We have trained our model on public photos which were popular/trending at some
point of time. We fed these images to a deep CNN (Convolutional Neural
Network) which started to recognise features that made photos popular. What we
realise in the process that these features do change with time so we have
added a temporal component to our training set to ensure our model is
relevant. It is currently optimised more for human photos and travel images so
maybe in our next iteration, we can predict pets photos as well.

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kowdermeister
Do you consider a simple web interface where I can upload a photo?

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parths
As of now, the focus is only on the mobile apps. Though,in future we are
planning to release an API with a web demo for the same.

