Using computer vision to make millions of memes

gifs.com
3 min readOct 12, 2016

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Gifs and short mp4s may be whimsical, but gifs.com looks at them through a different lens. Over the coming months, gifs.com will be unveiling large scale computer vision, machine learning, and automation projects that tap into the information we’re collecting. We’re a little hush hush on the specific projects we’re working on, but we can’t wait to show you — we think they’ll change the video industry.

Today, gifs.com is excited to announce a fun experiment that probes into our millions of user created gifs, uses some basic computer vision, and flexes our engineering muscles at a larger scale: Gifs.com made 1,000,001 Deal With It gifs — programmatically, using computer vision.

Check out the million and one Deal With It gifs live here: 1,000,001 Deal With It gifs

That’s only like 20/1,000,001 gifs!
#madebyacomputer

How it works — an overview

Step 1: Split the gif into multiple frames. This helps us analyze the entire gif, piece by piece.

Step 2: Find all of the faces in the gif, and select the frame the effect should be applied to. When our algorithm is selecting a frame, it will choose the frame that contains the largest face (with some additional stipulations). If there are multiple faces in the frame, it will choose all of them.

Step 3: Rotate+add sunglasses to properly sit on the face(s) selected, and add the “Deal With It” caption. A meme is born.

Step 4: Repeat 1,000,000 times

This is only 308 times

The results can range from impressive Reddit-worthy memes, to silly computer-made attempts.

Can I be made into a Deal With It Meme?

Actually yes — go like a post from @heartforgif on twitter, and you’ll automatically be dealt with!

What’s next?

We’re excited to continue serving our users as the best gif and short video editor on the internet.

This project was a unique way of testing some scale, marketing that we’re hiring for our computer vision/machine learning team, as well as providing a little teaser to what we’re working on at gifs.com.

We’d love to hear what you think about this process, computer vision, gifs.com, our product — anything, really. Are you working on CV and ML? What’s your favorite meme? Maybe you have questions for us? You can reach out to us at rory[at]gifs[dot]com.

P.S. Don’t forget to heart gifs on the feed to save to your account!

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gifs.com

Video, transcoding, gifs, editing, computer vision, and more — www.gifs.com