--- 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: ~ commentary: ~ commref: ~ confdates: ~ conference: ~ confloc: ~ contact_email: ~ creators_id: [] 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 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: [] 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 issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] 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 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: ~ number: ~ pagerange: ~ pubdom: FALSE publication: ~ publisher: ~ refereed: FALSE referencetext: ~ relation_type: [] relation_uri: [] 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: ~