TY  - GEN
ID  - cogprints690
UR  - http://cogprints.org/690/
A1  - Schmidhuber, Juergen
TI  - Facial beauty and fractal geometry
Y1  - 1998/06//
N2  - 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.
AV  - public
KW  - beauty
KW  -  attractiveness
KW  -  fractal geometry
KW  -  low-complexity art
KW  -  low-complexity coding
KW  -  vision
KW  -  low-complexity face
KW  -  aesthetics
KW  -  information theory
KW  -  Kolmogorov complexity
KW  -  algorithmic complexity
ER  -

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