The average student

An algorithmically generated magazine cover | done with Sonali Bansal, Karnika Shivhare and Nitesh Demla, MITS Gwalior

For my college’s Computer Science / IT department’s magazine, a cover that said “this magazine is for you, and it speaks about you” was needed. If somehow every student had a part in the very first page of the magazine, the cover itself, it suited. We felt a Computer Science and IT department could do so much better than a collage.

To start with, I went about capturing portraits of everyone student in the department. Needless to say, getting pictures clicked for the magazine's cover page made everyone a little excited; I daresay it was personally rewarding too.

The portraits were run through an algorithm to generate the composited face on the right. More than pixel value averaging, this was created by averaging distances between facial features

The cover image is an averaged composite of ~60 portraits of CS/IT students averaged over pixel density and distances between facial features to make a face that represents a typical CS/IT student. The team finally added finishing touches by filling it with the names of everyone who was a part of the composite.