fractal face

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

                FACIAL BEAUTY AND FRACTAL GEOMETRY 

                       Juergen Schmidhuber

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 encod-
able 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.

HTML:          http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoface/locoface.html 
                                 (5 color figures, total of 0.7MB)

Postscript:          ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/locoface.ps.gz 
                                   (7 pages, 1.3MB, 5MB gunzipped)
Comments welcome!
                                                IDSIA, Switzerland
Juergen Schmidhuber                                   www.idsia.ch