Is it going to be like a true international tournament like the Olympics or Canada/World Cup where these guys play their hearts out to try to win one for their country? Or is it going to be like an All Star game where they mess around, have fun, no one plays defense, no one wants to get injured heading into the playoffs, etc?

Introduction

While downloading NHL official player headshots for a graphic I was working on, an idea dawned on me which felt both very fun and interesting:

“Which player has the biggest smile in the NHL?”

We can calculate this by using computer vision! Let’s get to it.

Using CV for Facial Recognition

Facial Recognition

Using computer vision (CV) we can have a model which looks at each headshot and determine the location of facial features on each player. Thankfully, there is a public model available on GitHub which has done the legwork for us!

Italo José created which we can use for our task. Their model places landmarks on a person’s face to define facial features. For our project, we are looking just at the landmarks which make up the mouth.

What is a smile?

We are defining a smile as “the portion of a player’s mouth which is between their lips”. While that may be a mouthful, it is essentially the area of teeth which the model calculates. An example would better illustrate this.

For this example, we are looking at Sidney Crosby.

Looking good! The model accurately highlighted Sidney Crosby’s smile. While the smile isn’t fully captured, it is a good approximation. Now, to determine which players have the largest smiles, we need a method to calculate the polygons which make up their smile.

Calculating the Size of a Smile

The (also known as Gauss’s area formula) is an algorithm to calculate the area of a polygon, even irregular ones.

We can calculate the area of each player’s “smile” using this formula and then determine which players have the biggest smile!

With the areas calculated, we can now determine which players have the biggest smiles in the NHL

Here are the top 10 Smiles in the NHL by Area:

Conclusion

I actually did this project for MLB Players earlier this week and thought it would be fun to apply it to NHL players.

I hope you enjoyed!