@misc{cogprints690, month = {June}, title = {Facial beauty and fractal geometry}, author = {Juergen Schmidhuber}, year = {1998}, keywords = {beauty, attractiveness, fractal geometry, low-complexity art, low-complexity coding, vision, low-complexity face, aesthetics, information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, algorithmic complexity}, url = {http://cogprints.org/690/}, abstract = {What is it that makes a face beautiful? Average faces obtained by photographic (Galton 1878) or digital (Langlois \& Roggman 1990) blending are judged attractive but not optimally attractive (Alley \& Cunningham 1991) --- digital exaggerations of deviations from average face blends can lead to higher attractiveness ratings (Perrett, May, \& Yoshikawa 1994). My novel approach to face design does not involve blending at all. Instead, the image of a female face with high ratings is composed from a fractal geometry based on rotated squares and powers of two. The corresponding geometric rules are more specific than those previously used by artists such as Leonardo and Duerer. They yield a short algorithmic description of all facial characteristics, many of which are compactly encodable with the help of simple feature detectors similar to those found in mammalian brains. This suggests that a face's beauty correlates with simplicity relative to the subjective observer's way of encoding it.} }