Slashdot Mirror
Algorithms Can Make You Pretty
caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has an interesting story on a new algorithm by researchers from Tel Aviv University that modifies a facial picture of a person to conform to standards of attractiveness. Based on a digital library of pictures of people who have been judged 'attractive,' the algorithm finds the nearest match and modifies an input picture so it conforms to the 'attractive' person's proportions. The trick, however, is that the resultant pictures are still recognizable as the original person. Here's a quick link to a representative picture of the process. Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive." Note: As reader Trent Waddington points out, the underlying research was mentioned in an earlier story as well.
Picture into the machine
--
I bet it crashes !
..how this would handle a goatse pic.
Now, which port on this computer do I stuff my wife in?
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
A way for people to fake their online photos in a way that when you finally meet them IRL you go ... AAAGH! What ... happened.. .to you... Car accident?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apparently one of the biggest things you can do to make someone's face more attractive is to mirror one side onto the other.
From the same picture, it looks like their algorithm decided not to do much mirroring. Looks like it made her eyes smaller and her face a little rounder. Plus wrinkle smoothing and adding some skin glow.
It didn't fix some asymmetries, like her nose.
The one on the right was hotter, so I guess it works.
I put my picture in and nothing changed.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
They are never going to get away from the cultural influence.
I suspect that's why they used two different countries for their data. It's funny just how horrified some people are by the idea of hardcoded behavior in humans. It's a fight that's pretty much over at this point, and the nature and nurture camps both had a lot right and wrong.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I seem to remember a Discovery channel special with John Cleese that discussed the math behind good looks. I understand this is a learning algorithm but I wonder how much easily this could be accomplished just by enforcing the golden ratio on a face. I think science has come up with a more exact ratio for faces. Honestly, the sample picture looks like they made her face shorter and easily more attractive that way.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and when you get old looks fade and all those cliched adages.
My work here is dung.
that photo just shows it didn't work
Here's the original...
Here's the source...
Someone had to have judged the pictures of those who were deemed to be attractive, and that person's opinion may not match that of the person who is getting the surgery, and both their opinions may not match that of others who will interact with the person electing to have the modification.
Twinstiq, game news
Fox "News" already does this when they're running stories about reporters from other news outlets.
--MarkusQ
Conforms to standards of attractiveness....
Hmm let me see that sounds like a blatent social heard mentality.
Beauty is the person shining from within.
That the 'before' picture is much more appealing. She has nice eyes and an interesting, engaging face. She looks like someone who would be worth talking to.
The 'after' picture looks like a generic pretty-but-not-beautiful girl. She looks like she would be interested in shopping and hairstyles. The world would be very boring if everyone looked like that.
Read Pynchon.
It doesn't look like the same person anymore, but a completely different person with a different face while keeping the same hair and clothes.
Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.
Pfft, obviously this thing hasn't had to chew on my picture. It'd be a damn good algorithm that could find it's way out of this local attractiveness minimum.
The enemies of Democracy are
From TFA: "Irregular beauty is the real beauty," said Dr. Banner, adding that such attempts to measure beauty are driven culturally by sameness, making everyone look alike.
I agree with Dr. Banner, and not just because I don't want to make him angry.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder blah blah blah..... I say beauty is cultural. The parameters by which program works are based on a elitist 'Hollywood' culture, the fact that a 'scientist' would prescribe to such unfair generalizations is offensive to me. Yea Yea demonstrating a concept blah blah blah.
I couldn't sense any difference between the two pictures for most of the guys, but the pictures of the women seemed significantly different. Maybe I'm just weird, or maybe, as a guy, I recognize the subtleties of women's faces better, or maybe I recognize the differences more readily because I look at a lot more women than men.
Anyone else notice the same thing? As well, did any women notice the differences in the men a lot easier than in the women?
Now, which port on this computer do I stuff my wife in?
Most digital cameras connect to a PC using USB, presenting themselves as either Picture Transfer Protocol) devices or mass storage devices. So make her look as pretty as you can with tasteful makeup, photograph her, and let the computer do the rest.
Which of them?
I smell a new plugin for Photoshop and Gimp!
If you can go both positive and negative, and in a subtle way, you might see this applied to still photos (or perhaps video eventually) of the various candidates - a little bump up for yours, a little bump down for theirs. It already happens; this would just push the envelope a little farther. Most people will never see the candidates up close an personal, so it's likely to go mostly unnoticed if done well.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In the sample picture, we see what I would consider to be an average "horse-faced" woman. In the other picture, we see what looks like the star actress of Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.
The second is most certainly NOT recognizable as the first. They share the same coloring, but that's about it. While I have found that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, I also find that facial recognition methods are in the mind of the beholder as well. Whether consciously or not, people vary from person to person what they look at in terms of facial recognition in people. I go straight for the jaw line, then cheek bones, then the bones surrounding the eye, then the nose or whatever "stands out" as a feature or defect... and that is just to start with.
You may do your own self-analysis to determine what you actually look at on people, but unless this adjustment algorithm matches your method of perception and recognition, you will not likely agree that the after is recognizable as the before.
I wonder how much easily this could be accomplished just by enforcing the golden ratio on a face.
If you enforce the golden ratio too far, you get Precious Moments, where the eyes are a golden ratio down the face (resulting in a huge forehead) and the neck is a golden ratio up the body (resulting in difficulty putting on clothes).
Take this technology and add the technology found here: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm ... and you instantly have "beautiful" actors!... ... and a recursive loop that eventually turns everyone into two actors (one female definition of "beauty" and one male).
I mentioned tinker-toys once in a post - now I'm modded down for life.
Seriously. Like, Chris Isaak, with Liz Taylor's eyes. But, without my overbite, I'd look dull.
So, there's software to make faces bland and uninteresting - go figure. I like the "before" picture girl - with the giant eyes, and super-sized mouth. Sensual, and sensitive. Those are attributes the "beautifying" stripped away...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I am not sure about Hillary (you could've provided a link)
Hillary Clinton was a candidate in the U.S. Presidential election; here is some information about her and here is her website. She was also married to a former president of the U.S. Let me know if you need links or information about him too.
I've always found that "cp" works just fine for me.
The brown-eyed girl looks plain now. Not ugly, just plain. The before picture had a more expressing face.
The pictures on this page (http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/beautification2008/) are absolutely lame. The "before" pics had people in a neutral to a tiny bit of sad face(look at the lips). The new pics simple lift the corners of the lips and tada, better results. That's not better, that's cheap. Since the days of tell-sell I have realised that the before/after contruct was purely based on non-smiling/smiling people because it's that much of a change. This algorithm fails and should not be touted as the best thing since sliced bread.
Also, it makes Woody Allen look like someone who is 90.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It does much the same, but leaves the face alone and photoshops it onto an image taken from a fashion magazine.
It's still recognizable as the same person, but they look a lot better.
This technique is so powerful, that if you choose the right magazine (eg, Playboy, Hustler etc) that the test subjects don't even notice if you cut the original face out badly.
Three out of Four test subjects said "What Face" when asked about this irregularity and two left the test early with the new pictures, no doubt impressed by the quality of my algorythm.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
They all start looking prettier after the third beer...
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
Did anyone else notice that in nearly all the exemplars, the algorithm tweaked the mouth so that it was smiling more?
What does that tell you about attractiveness?
Aikon-
"...could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.
Obviously that's not needed around here.
Sig this!
It might be interesting to see what this algorithm would do with Mount Rushmore, The Statue of Liberty, or the Mona Lisa? Granted these things are already beautiful, I'm just interested in what the output would be.
Just gather massive amounts of wealth, and you're *always* attractive.
Except for the "gathering" part, it's so simple!
>>I liked the woman on the left (original) better,
Ditto. Or as my inner-voice whispered, "The one on the left looks real, the one on the right looks like she'd be a bitch."
"Before and after of Alison Bruce. The software program is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones."
So a bunch of Germans and Jews got together and sorted through a bunch of people to determine which ones were better?
Wow. Just wow.
Human faces are not symmetric, and our brains know that even if we don't.
Mirrored faces often seem grotesque. Or at least plastic-robotic.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've seen the full video and looked at the article from the SIGGRAPH materials. All of the "after" pictures except one did look more or less better than the "before" picture, but there was one consistent change I noticed -- many of the subjects, especially among the female photos, appeared to be frowning or pouting in the original picture, and the modified picture turned up the corners of the mouth into more of a smile.
This tells me that simply smiling can enhance one's attractiveness a great deal!
"...abhorrence of eccentricity or individuality...
Unfortunately, I think this is perennial, not modern. But yeah - you're right. The technology of "communications" today means a more efficacious way of speedily distributing that mean towards its baseline...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...who keeps misreading this as "algorithms can make you petty?"
I have an algorithm to make women look prettier. It involves large quantities of alcohol.
I'm looking to use this for a bs acne commercial and save myself some time photoshopping ugly people. Also is there a plugin that I can use for my upcomming dietary supplement commercials?
personally, i find the faceresearch.org demo posted on Slashdot a while back the most interesting. unlike this algorithm, it actually presents some interesting findings about the psychology of aesthetic beauty.
rather than manipulating a single photo to make that person more "pretty." it allows you to average different people's head shots. and the result of this research seems to show that our perception of beauty is based on the mean range of facial geometries we're exposed to. we naturally find faces that are the most "average" attractive. but different populations have different averages, so there are still cultural differences.
another way to look at it is that instead of looking for features that define beauty, we really just have an aversion to faces that deviate too much from the cultural norm as defined by the average range of facial configurations. now, everyone has unique features that distinguish them from others, and everyone deviates from the population average in some respect, but some show a greater deviation than others, which may indicate their genetic fitness. and so our psychological attraction to average faces is an evolutionarily learned trait to help us pick the most genetically healthy individuals to mate with.
but what's interesting is that if you mix several very different faces that don't meet conventional standards of beauty, you will actually get a very attractive face as a result (try this in the demo by picking the ugliest faces out of the gallery to mix). this is probably because even though "ugly" people deviate largely from the cultural average, they all deviate in different ways, so it doesn't take two beautiful individuals to produce an attractive average.
a corollary to this effect is that a couple with drastically different looks will give birth to very attractive children. which actually works out perfectly with another evolutionary trait--that of opposites attracting. human beings (and perhaps other mammals as well) are attracted to individuals with a very different histocompatibility index to themselves. that is to say, we are attracted to individuals which are very genetically different from ourselves. we can detect people's histocompatibility with our own based on their body scent. and double blind studies have found that men and women find the body odors of individuals whose Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) was the most different from their own. this is to ensure that their offspring will receive a diverse set of genes, which leads to a more robust immune system and prevents inbreeding.
now, my personal theory is, men and women don't just find partners with complementary MHCs to them based on scent alone. facial features can also be an indication of genetic differences. so this may also lead to individuals being attracted to people who have very different facial features from themselves. and since the average of two drastically different faces produces a more average face, this also leads to better looking children.
... they've just effectively copied the algorithm better known as 'beer goggles'...
Portrait Professional already does this, mostly. Manually ID a few facial lines, and modify according to 'beauty standards'. Currently version 8.
This is really interesting software, but I think it makes a mistake in making the assumption that the one picture being made "prettier" will result in a prettier face if the subject smiles. Imagine each of these faces if they were smiling, the before and after.
Interesting followup research maybe.... though practical application... hmmmm.
The studios can now feed it thousands of pictures of 13 year old girls modeling bathing suits along with individual raw frames of a 30 year old woman having sex and emit child porn. Then we can delve into the legal Hell of arguing whether or not this is a partial sexual depiction of the source 13 year old girls.
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...the example picture on the left is the edited one, although I never knew Uma Thurman was considered attractive.
Man, that is creepy as hell. I'm not sure the after picture is actually prettier than the before picture either.
There is a war going on for your mind.
...but they told me the one required to make me look pretty ran 15GB, compressed.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Not that this has anything to do with what the software is doing, but some of the differences between the two images are similar to what you get when you compare a portrait taken with a wide-angle and one taken with a telephoto. There's a reason why wide-angle lenses usually make poor portrait lenses. They exaggerate apparent relative distances on the Z plane, with bulging eyes, lips, and nose, and too-small ears. Judging from the look of her face, I'm guessing that the original was taken with a wide-angle. If so, the difference between the image and how a person's eye would see her is going to be the same kind of difference this software generates. The face is distorted, but easily recognizable. I'd go so far to say that, with so many portraits now taken with camera phones and the like, the distortion has become commonplace and looks normal.
http://www.hash.com/users/jsherwood/tutes/focal/focal.html
But I actually read this article in an honest-to-gosh "hard"copy newspaper today.
Why is this downrated? It's a tried and tested method!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The one on the right has a flat head and the bottom of her ears are cut off. If you saw the one on the right from a different angle, she would look messed up, or would need a different transformation. The one on the left would look much better in real life, because when she turns her head a little bit, it wouldn't ruin her looks.
Its official photo editing bots have a fetish for kinky anal nasal smexxxing. Just look at the weird technocolor blending on her nostrils and its curvature change. The smaller eyes, rounded face, and redder lips are most noticable changes though.
Is the program available for download?
there is an algorithm which beautifies humans since ages, it's called evolution.
compare images of people a few centuries back to images of people from today, and you will see that genes are just as good building an average out of multiple faces.
so don't be scared about this kind of technology, it's just showing us what we will look like in the future, given that people all over the world continue to fornicate across borders.
girls from japan, you have my email address.
Do not trust this signature.
Beautify Each & Every Rank'un ?
So, you assign an entire personality just on looks, no not even looks. Facial STRUCTURE? Because that is all that changed. The 2nd photo doesn't have more make-up, different clothes or a new hairdo. it is the SAME woman, just with a different facial structure.
So, pretty but not quite beautiful girls can only be intrested in shopping right?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just take a picture with your paycheck. Digitally enhance the picture to increase the amount and voila, you are attractive.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
and the process is far more fun.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I don't know, but I think she would look really nice in a burka.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Why the fuck would anyone want to be reminded that they could have looked better if nature and genetics had been kinder? Fuck that. I'll stick with the real harsh "ugly" pics.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The "after" girl is slightly more attractive...but I might just be saying that because the before girl looks a bit too insectoid for my taste.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I find the headline "Algorithms Can Make You Pretty" is true. After looking at the pictures though, I don't think that those algorithms will though. I find this a really funny topic to find on slashdot. Any one here have a 12-14 aged daughter? After defining what an algorithm is to them, ask them for a their personal algorithm for making them look pretty. You'll likely be shocked, but that would likely be a much more successful algorithm.
Any married slashdotters? If you dare, ask the same thing of your wife. That would likely be the algorithm that best works for getting you attracted to them. It's actually personalized to your and her tastes even if you don't know really take notice of it. I would have a place and date arranged to where I can take my wife when she gets pretty. You'll need something like that after asking the question to sooth things over anyway.
The great thing about this is that we all have different standards so our version of a good looking attractive mate may be completely different from others.
I mod as I live: incoherently! (hic!)
Is a surgical technique that can alter the geometry of my skull! It's so simple! Hollywood, here I come!
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I think the only difference in the guys before and after pics are how close his eyes are together. They got closer. That has always been a drawback for me. Every cop that notices how close together mine are pulls me over and gives me tickets.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Since when does Anonymous Coward have a sig?
When reading this article I've been immediately struck by the following:
Do her wider-set eyes, the longer distance between her hairline and the bridge of the nose, and the rounder shape of her face make her more beautiful?
As far as I know, facial recognition algorithms rely on these metrics to classify faces and be able to recognize them despite changes in makeup, hair cut, and lighting. So is this software the easy way to get around facial recognition technology?
You could take a photo of yourself with a digital camera, tweak it with this software, and then give it to the official the next time you get a passport. The official will identify the photo as being you because of the "unmistakable similarity" to the original touted by the article. But any software using your now 'official' photo will not recognize you.
Of course the solution is simple (and maybe already in place in some countries): don't let your citizens provide their passport photo.
I disagree that it is "still recognizable as the original person". Sure, with the 2 pictures side by side, same angle, same clothes, same earrings, and same makeup, they look very similar. But if you gave me a different picture taken on a different day with different clothes and you asked me to compare to the modified picture, I would probably say they are different people.
Let's think 80/20 here, for most people, take the parsimonious route to attractiveness..."lose the fat on your neck"
That's simple:
cp ( SlashdotUID.gender == male ? BradPitt.jpg : AngelinaJolie.jpg ) SlashdotUID.photo
Have gnu, will travel.
How will modifying her face increase the size of her rack ?
from the too-late-for-me dept.
A better choice would have been "from the number-twelve-looks-just-like-you dept."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
ah.. i thought you were talking about the old 'cock in the mouth' path to beauty that we should encourage women to try asap.. i dunno what it is but i generally think women look better with a cock in the mouth, (preferably mine of course)
When is a real time version of this coming out, so us geeks can wear a monitor over my head!
> i generally think women look better with a cock in the mouth, (preferably mine of course)
You think women look better when you have a cock in your mouth??? WTF dude!
...but you can't drink a fat girl thin.
If you enforce the golden ratio too far, you get Precious Moments [about.com], where the eyes are a golden ratio down the face (resulting in a huge forehead) and the neck is a golden ratio up the body (resulting in difficulty putting on clothes).
Hrm... take off the hair, adjust the hues, and you have something not entirely unlike Greys.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)