http://cogprints.org/690/
Facial beauty and fractal geometry
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.
Schmidhuber, Juergen
Behavioral Analysis
Behavioral Neuroscience
Animal Cognition
Sociobiology
Cognitive Psychology
Computational Neuroscience
Comparative Psychology
Artificial Intelligence
Complexity Theory
Machine Vision
Neural Nets
Statistical Models
Perceptual Cognitive Psychology
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Science
Juergen
Schmidhuber