If you ever wondered what characteristics elite athletes share, redditor osmutiar has the answer. He has acquired datasets of portraits of top-class sportspeople and has developed a set of algorithms that 'draw' the average face, and it's messing with peoples' minds.
With his posts accumulating tens of thousands of upvotes on reddit, osmutiar has determined the typical look of top male tennis players, female and male football players, professional golfers, and NBA stars.
"Imagine you have a set of images for professional golfers with holes punched on both their eyeballs and mouth," he explains the process. "Now you are asked to place those pictures like stacking dominos on the floor so that you can align holes on all of the pictures. How will you do it? Analogous to what you'd probably do is the Affine Transform in image processing. After aligning images, it is basically just the average value of each pixel."
Combined faces of top 225 NBA players
Combined faces of top 500 professional golfers
Top 130 female soccer players averaged (left) and top 300 male soccer players averaged (right)
Combined faces for top 102 tennis players
