title: Facial beauty and fractal geometry
creator: Schmidhuber, Juergen
subject: Behavioral Analysis
subject: Behavioral Neuroscience
subject: Animal Cognition
subject: Sociobiology
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Computational Neuroscience
subject: Comparative Psychology
subject: Artificial Intelligence
subject: Complexity Theory
subject: Machine Vision
subject: Neural Nets
subject: Statistical Models
subject: Perceptual Cognitive Psychology
subject: Philosophy of Mind
subject: Philosophy of Science
description: 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.
date: 1998-06
type: Departmental Technical Report
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: text/html
identifier: http://cogprints.org/690/1/newlocoface.html
identifier:   Schmidhuber, Juergen  (1998) Facial beauty and fractal geometry.  [Departmental Technical Report]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/690/