We first wrote about "Artificial Beauty" here on AppScout in February 2007. Whitney Reynolds wrote of the Israeli researchers whose results are "noticeable, but not dramatic." The work continues, including a paper from this August's SIGGRAPH meeting.

"Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness" is all about making the human face more beautiful through mathematics. We've known for a while a more symmetrical face is a prettier face. USA Weekend quoted studies, such as those conducted by Randy Thornhill (University of New Mexico) and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna), which "confirm that beauty is simply balance: The more symmetrical a face, the more appealing it appears."

A few examples after the jump.

Turning what we know into a practical application isn't easy. The geometry of a face must be quantified, before subtle changes can be applied. No one is looking at aesthetics. It's math, math math.

Source: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness - "Given a frontal portrait as input we first (semi-automatically) identify a set of facial landmarks (feature points). Using a planar graph with these feature points as vertices, we extract a vector of distances corresponding to the lengths of the edges in the graph. This vector is fed into the beautification engine, which yields a modified vector of distances, possessing a higher predicted beauty score than that of the original vector. Next, the planar graph is re-embedded in the plane attempting to make the new edge lengths as close as possible to the modified distances. The resulting new positions of the feature points define a 2D warp field that we use to warp the input portrait into its beautified version"


In the photos above the top is the original, the bottom "beautified." Most people see more perceived beauty in the bottom photos--but look at how little real difference there is. Beauty is much more nuance than bold stroke. None of us is far from beautiful.

Are there any moral obligations when you create "a novel tool capable of automatically enhancing the attractiveness of a face in a given frontal portrait." Will humanity be thrown into a funk when we realize no one can live up to the images we'll be presented with on-the-screen? There is already a concern about adolescents attempting to keep up with the nearly unattainable body images shown in the media. Will this technology only make matters worse? Or, will talented actors, now marginalized because they're not drop-dead gorgeous, find work as beauty becomes fungible?