In Snow White it was the magical mirror that answered the question “who’s the fairest of them all?” Now Australian researchers have created software to answer this question. They extracted 13 features and used C4.5 as classification method (more features below). (Detail can be found in: Assessing facial beauty through proportion analysis by image processing and supervised learning)
With that in hand, it may be natural to wonder who’s the most beautiful of them all? Shocking answer may be found in the research done at the universities of Regensburg and Rostock in Germany, where they did a large research project on ‘facial attractiveness’.
A remarkable result of our research project is that faces which have been rated as highly attractive do not exist in reality. This became particularly obvious when test subjects (independently of their sex!) favored women with facial shapes of about 14 year old girls. There is no such woman existing in reality! They are artificial products – results of modern computer technology.
Thus, sad as it may be, your ideal beauty may not be in this world. So going back to the good old Snow White, if the magical mirror were asked the question today, it may answer; “You’re the fairest where you are, but in the virtual world, well let’s not go into that..”
If you’re interested in what features they used for classification, here they are ranked from the most useful to the least useful:
(1) 2:4 Vertical distance between pupils and tip of the chin to vertical distance between top of the face and pupils
(2) 3:5 Vertical distance between top of the face and nose to vertical distance between nostrils and tip of the chin
(3) 6:7 Vertical distance between pupils and central lip line to vertical distance between lips and tip of the chin
(4) 5:8 Vertical distance between nostrils and tip of the chin to vertical distance between pupils and nostrils
(5) 8:9 Vertical distance between pupils and nostrils to vertical distance between nostrils and central lip line
(6) 7:9 Vertical distance between lips and tip of the chin to vertical distance between nostrils and central lip line
(7) Mean_ratio
(8) 16:1 Ratio of face width to face length
(9) 15:16 Ratio of inter-eye distance to face width
(10) 10:1 Ratio of vertical distance between top of the face and eyebrows to face length
(11) 11:1 Ratio of vertical distance between eyebrows and tip of the nose to face length
(12) 12:1 Ratio of vertical distance between tip of the nose and tip of the chin to face length
(13) 13:14 Ratio of vertical distance between the tip of nose and lips to vertical distance between lips and tip of the chin
And here are the surreal faces:
