Twitter is using AI to intelligently crop image previews

Twitter says it's now using machine learning to identify the most salient part of an image and crop picture previews accordingly  

The ability to share photos directly on Twitter has existed since 2011 and is now an integral part of the Twitter experience. Today, millions of images are uploaded to Twitter every day. However, they can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, which presents a challenge for rendering a consistent UI experience. The photos in your timeline are cropped to improve consistency and to allow you to see more Tweets at a glance. How do we decide what to crop, that is, which part of the image do we show you?

Previously, we used face detection to focus the view on the most prominent face we could find. 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.

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