The aspect floor rejected everything below 1.15 because a square raster is
usually album art, and album art clears every other gate. That proxy also threw
away square PRESS photography -- Nikki Nair's entire usable corpus is 1:1 crops
from Rinse FM, Corsica Studios and 529 Atlanta, so he had no route to a hero at
all.
Shape cannot separate those two cases, but the catalogue can: a sleeve IS one
of the artist's covers. A square candidate is now perceptually hashed against
up to 25 of the artist's own releases and admitted only when it matches none,
reusing the dhash and distance threshold already used for cover resolution.
With no hashes available -- no Deezer id, or the lookup failed -- it falls back
to the old blanket rejection rather than guessing.
The covers are fetched alongside Bing discovery rather than after it, at 250px
and mostly from the shared image cache, so it costs no wall clock next to the
multi-megabyte hero candidates. The six-second seed path passes no hashes: it
exists to paint something safe quickly, and a square candidate can wait for the
exhaustive pass to adjudicate it.
Nikki Nair goes from BANNER NONE to 2 -- a withguitars promo shot and a 529
Atlanta press photo, verified rendering correctly. Camping in Alaska is
unchanged with its three banners, so the guard that this gate was originally
added for still holds: its square "lost and found" sleeve stays out.
Tests cover the fork directly: a square matching a release is rejected, a
square matching none is admitted, a square with no catalogue knowledge is
rejected, portrait is admitted, and a portrait too narrow to crop is not.
KeelrLeek
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