Could a robot do it better? (Image: Patryce Bak/Getty)

PAPARAZZI could soon be fighting for their jobs with robots that can take aesthetically pleasing photos.

To create such a robot, Raghudeep Gadde, a computer scientist at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hydrabad, India, turned to a humanoid robot called NAO that is equipped with a head-mounted camera. He and his team have programmed NAO to obey two simple photographic guidelines known as the rule of thirds and the golden ratio.

The former states that an image should be divided into three, both vertically and horizontally, with interesting features placed where the dividing lines cross. The latter suggests the horizon line should divide a photo into two rectangles with the larger being 1.62 times the size of the smaller – the golden ratio.


The robot is also programmed to assess the quality of its photos by rating focus, lighting and colour. The researchers taught it what makes a great photo by analysing the top and bottom 10 per cent of 60,000 images from a website hosting a photography contest, as rated by humans.

Armed with this knowledge, the robot can take photos when told to, then determine their quality. If the image scores below a certain quality threshold, the robot automatically makes another attempt. It improves on the first shot by working out the photo’s deviation from the guidelines and making the appropriate correction to its camera’s orientation.

Gadde, who will present the research at an artificial intelligence conference in Barcelona, Spain, this month, says this makes the system very flexible. “Earlier photographer robot systems are predominantly limited to capturing photographs of humans,” he says, because they rely on face or skin-colour detection. “Our approach is generic and does not rely on the subject of the image being captured.”

Bill Smart of Washington University in St Louis, who has also built a robot photographer, says the approach is an improvement on previous attempts. But robots still can’t match human photographers because they can’t recognise points of interest, he adds. “Good compositions in photographs have interesting things in them, and there’s no such thing as an ‘interesting thing detector’.” Gadde’s system could be used to take formulaic photos that all follow certain rules, such as actors’ headshots, he says.