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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.
..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
Online dating, here I come!
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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.
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.
Here's the original...
Here's the source...
Fox "News" already does this when they're running stories about reporters from other news outlets.
--MarkusQ
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
I am not sure about Hillary (you could've provided a link), but if i have to go by the two pictures at the top of TFA, i'd say the algorithm isn't working very well for me. I find the original face more attractive than the result.
Maybe the algorithm works to tune an image to _someone's_ preferences, but those are different than mine. That is, beauty is still in the eye of the beholder.
What else is new?
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?
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).
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.
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
"...could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.
Obviously that's not needed around here.
Sig this!
Just gather massive amounts of wealth, and you're *always* attractive.
Except for the "gathering" part, it's so simple!
And that same someone apparently had mod points.
"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!
...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.
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.
I propose a contest, put goatse man and one of those women in a thunderdome, the winner is the one that leaves with the loser stuffed inside them
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.
goatSHE was hot thou..
I dunno, I think the second was more attractive, due mostly I think due to the cleanup of a few blemishes and skin tone enhancement (but that was probably poor lighting in the original, anyway)
On the other hand.. The second picture looks a lot more like Summer Glau than it does like the first picture.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hey! You stole my joke! I was thinking exactly the same thing. (GIRL: "You don't look like your photo." ME: "Yeah well it's a few years old.")
It's interesting that the "sample photo" really did not change much. It basically just shrunk the vertical resolution, thereby making her look rounder-headed, and more like a teenager. I could do that on paint very easily.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.