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.
..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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
Mirrored yes. But more symmetric does appear more attractive.
From the sample it looks like their algorithm almost completely disregarded several opportunities for increasing symmetry and improved the face in other ways.
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