saliency algorithm in next/image?

[CaptainN]

Goals

1. Next crops images - great! It doesn't do so very artistically...
2. Can nextjs ship something a bit smarter in its cropping algorithm?
3. Some kind of API to extend next/image's cropping could be enough
4. A "dumber" solution could be adding a focal point or gravity prop for cropping.

Non-Goals

1. I don't want to use Cloudinary - I can do that already, and some clients (most of them) can't use that.
2. I don't want to use any external hosted tools - I'm asking for this to be built in to nextjs, or something that can be added to standalone instances.
3. A product from Vercel that uses Vercel's AI would be nice for Vercel deploys, but I'm really looking for something that can be used in standalone nextjs deployments.

Background

Going between break points, where maybe you have a very wide short image for a banner header, to mobile, which maybe crops closer to square - you can get some pretty ugly results. There's a lot of content out there on this topic.

Cloudinary has a "smart" crop feature, based on (from a quick google) saliency algorithm? mixed with some AI stuff?

Proposal

There are open source tools (sharp support) that seem to be able to do something like this.