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Facial beauty and fractal geometry

Schmidhuber, Juergen (1998) Facial beauty and fractal geometry. [Departmental Technical Report]

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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.

Item Type:Departmental Technical Report
Keywords:beauty, attractiveness, fractal geometry, low-complexity art, low-complexity coding, vision, low-complexity face, aesthetics, information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, algorithmic complexity
Subjects:Psychology > Behavioral Analysis
Neuroscience > Behavioral Neuroscience
Biology > Animal Cognition
Biology > Sociobiology
Psychology > Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience > Computational Neuroscience
Psychology > Comparative Psychology
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science > Complexity Theory
Computer Science > Machine Vision
Computer Science > Neural Nets
Computer Science > Statistical Models
Psychology > Perceptual Cognitive Psychology
Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy > Philosophy of Science
ID Code:690
Deposited By: Schmidhuber, Juergen
Deposited On:18 Jun 1998
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:54

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