You would think that having good quality thumbnails for your YouTube videos would be the least of your concerns. But if you’re a small brand trying to create buzz through the video sharing network, or if you’re a constant YouTube creator trying to make it big and become a viral video superstar, this is a very real concern. Google is trying to help with this small but important detail by introducing a brand new algorithm that will make it easier for you to choose thumbnails for your uploaded videos.
Because these thumbnails are like your video calling card or wallpaper, it’s important that they be of high quality. Google is launching an improved automatic YouTube thumbnailer, using the DNN or deep neural networks which have brought about advances in image and video classification. Basically, what it does is that while you’re uploading your video to YouTube, it’s already sampling frames at one frame per second. They then evaluate each frame with a quality model and assigned a quality score. These frames are then ranked with those with the highest scores then rendered as thumbnails with different aspect ratios and this is where you choose what will best represent your videos.
Of course some creators upload their own designed custom thumbnails. And it is the same high quality (assuming that the custom thumbnails are of good quality of course) that is used in the “binary classification” which they used to train the DNN. So basically, now they are able to help you choose better quality thumbnails for the video.
There are some more technical aspects to it, which you can read through from the source link. The new thumbnailer has already been launched across YouTube so you can already see better looking and higher quality thumbnail options fro your video.
SOURCE: Google
