Forward Selfies

Taking selfies is a common practice for smartphone users. Simultaneously capturing oneself and the desired background is not a trivial task, because it is often not possible to get a good view of both. Moreover, users often loose attention of their surroundings, thus taking a selfie also showed to lead to serious injuries. To ease the process of capturing selfies and to make it more safe, this work proposes forward selfies as a simple yet effective concept to account for both, risk and challenges. Forward selfies seamlessly combine images of the front-facing and the rear-facing smartphone camera. We propose a mobile app that builds on this concept and implements the selfie synthesis in a post-processing image composition stage. Thereby, we can take advantage of the commonly more advanced back-camera hardware, i.e., providing higher image resolutions, larger field of views, and different perspectives. Finally, we leverage built-in camera optimizations for independently (de-)focusing objects at different distances, such as for persons and backgrounds. We conclude that the concept of forward selfies can effectively address and solve certain challenges of capturing selfies, which we demonstrate by a simple app user interface.