---
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."
altloc:
- http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/locoface.html
chapter: ~
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contact_email: ~
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creators_name:
- family: Schmidhuber
given: Juergen
honourific: ''
lineage: ''
date: 1998-06
date_type: published
datestamp: 1998-06-18
department: Machine Learning Institute
dir: disk0/00/00/06/90
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editors_id: []
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eprint_status: archive
eprintid: 690
fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/690/1/newlocoface.html
full_text_status: public
importid: ~
institution: IDSIA
isbn: ~
ispublished: pub
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keywords: 'beauty, attractiveness, fractal geometry, low-complexity art, low-complexity coding, vision, low-complexity face, aesthetics, information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, algorithmic complexity'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:12
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metadata_visibility: show
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number: ~
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pubdom: FALSE
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refereed: FALSE
referencetext: ~
relation_type: []
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reportno: IDSIA-28-98
rev_number: 8
series: ~
source: ~
status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:32:55
subjects:
- behav-anal
- behav-neuro-sci
- bio-ani-cog
- bio-socio
- cog-psy
- comp-neuro-sci
- comp-psy
- comp-sci-art-intel
- comp-sci-complex-theory
- comp-sci-mach-vis
- comp-sci-neural-nets
- comp-sci-stat-model
- percep-cog-psy
- phil-mind
- phil-sci
succeeds: ~
suggestions: ~
sword_depositor: ~
sword_slug: ~
thesistype: ~
title: Facial beauty and fractal geometry
type: techreport
userid: 335
volume: ~