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Computers can use geometry to predict pretty faces

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, by Roger Highfield, Science Editor.
March 5, 2008.

Geometry: Golden Ratio, Golden Number, Golden Section, Divine Proportion, Phi, Extreme and mean ratio, Golden Rectangle, Fibonacci series, Symmetry, proportion, forehead height, nose length and width, distance between eyes, mouth width and face width, the Vetruvian Man.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but it could now be in the microchip too, after experiments suggest that a computer can use geometry to predict whether or not a face is attractive.

American scientists have programmed a computer to rate attractiveness using factors such as the golden ratio, a proportion that has been used by artists and architects since antiquity because it is aesthetically pleasing.

Females really are the fairer sex - rated more attractive by both men and women - according to the study by the team from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, which has devised an objective way to measure facial attractiveness, which gives reasonable agreement with what people think.

They also found a smaller chin and nose, a larger distance between the eyes and smaller mouth width were deemed desirable traits for females.

For men, the face being divided into equal vertical thirds was attractive, as well as the symmetry of the upper tips of the lips and the nose. Symmetry was also a factor, though not as important as the ratios.

The work confirms the emerging view of scientists that the appreciation of beauty has a deep-seated biological explanation: the face of an intended Valentine or date gives a profound insight into whether our true love will efficiently pass our genes on to future generations.

The study, published in the journal Pattern Recognition, required 36 participants (18 male and 18 female) to rate 232 images of full-frontal views of Caucasian faces on a 10-point attractiveness scale.

The researchers then took the results to compute attractiveness, paying close attention to how men and women rated the faces.

They also worked to identify which features tended to be present on an attractive face, measuring various landmarks such as the forehead height, nose length and width, distance between eyes, mouth width and face width.

Dr Kendra Schmid explained how they used "several golden ratios" and the body of rules used in art - "neoclassical canons" - for hundreds of years and more recently by plastic surgeons. to predict attractiveness, though they did not use other known "beauty factors" such as age, skin texture, and expression.

The study shows that as the ratio of the length of the face to the width of the face gets closer to the golden ratio, both male and female images were viewed as more attractive, for example.

There was good agreement between actual scorings of beauty and predictions, so that they were 8.48 and 8.00, respectively, for Meg Ryan, 8.36 and 7.72 for Britney Spears, 7.33 and 6.88 for Keanu Reeves, and 7.17 and 6.99 for Jude Law.

"It is really quite remarkable that something as complex as attractiveness can be modelled so accurately by using only the geometry of the face," she tells The Daily Telegraph.

Results revealed that men and women generally agree on overall attractiveness, but males tend to give higher scores than females.

Additionally, female faces were rated higher by both sexes, suggesting that feminine traits overall are viewed as more attractive.

"They are perceived by people as being more attractive (again recall we are dealing only with the geometry of the face)," says Dr Schmid.

The approach used in this study demonstrates that geometry can be effective in predicting the attractiveness of a face and the team hopes to track changes in perceptions of beauty down the ages. "Golden ratios appear in nature and are also used in art and architecture to provide beauty and balance," she says.

Read article at Telegraph.co.uk.


 

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