Seeing bodies: Using social media image analysis to better understand body image perception

Although there has been much research around social media use and trends there has been little relating to images, which now accounts for the majority of material posted on social media platforms. Whilst there is significant research on particular types of body presentations, in particular selfies, it is less well understood how good machines are at reading different types of bodies compared to humans. I aim to investigate how different types of bodies are shown and perceived on social media and hope to contribute to a fledgling field of study by developing techniques for analysing and making sense of online images both by using manual analysis and techniques relying on AI.