ENLIGHTEN3D

By Christian Laforte

Is beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Or is this just wishful thinking?

Psychologists have long known that infants are more attracted to attractive faces. They stare at them longer. Evidences are strong that humans are instinctively drawn to smooth skin and symmetric faces.

So what do you do if you’re not as pretty as you’d wish? Exercising, creams and plastic surgery only produce temporary results and take effort and money. Instead, I recommend a long-term solution: change the evidence, so you can brag about how you look to your virtual friends, or you can lament how beautiful you looked ten years ago. What if you could, in one click, make pictures of yourself, your family and your friends look like supermodels?

But isn’t this already possible? If you have money, time and talent at your disposal, you can hire good make-up and Photoshop artists to have a beautiful portrait:

Unfortunately, ugly people earn less than pretty people. So people like me who need this most can’t afford it.

Fortunately, computer graphics researchers are working on this problem. Tommer Leyvand and his colleagues have invented a new technique, Beautification, to enhance the aesthetic appeal of human faces, using a combination of machine learning and computer graphics algorithms.

Data-driven enhancement of facial attractiveness

Tommer Leyvand, Daniel Cohen-Or, Gideon Dror (Tel Aviv University), Dani Lischinski (The Hebrew University)

As noted by the authors, the applications are obvious and numerous. They include motion picture special effects, advertising, dating services and creating prettier avatars for virtual worlds. They also mention the interesting idea that every shapes (e.g. the front of a car) could be made more beautiful by making it look more like a pretty human face.

Their algorithm produces very cool results:

Before beautification:

… and after:

Still, don’t get excited too fast. Their approach is promising but there are still lots of limitations.

The algorithm uses pictures of faces, annotated with beauty scores. The faces are carefully taken, similarly to passport photographs, so the algorithms can operate in 2D. So it will take more research before they can apply their beautification to any of your old pictures, or before they can leverage the accumulated wisdom from the very scientific Hot Or Not web site.

Some of the “beautified” images also end up looking creepy. I might be wrong but I think that some of the eyes end up with different sizes of iris and pupils, something humans are very sensitive to. (Dilated pupils are a sign of sexual attraction.)

The approach is only demonstrated on Caucasian, adult people. The authors suggest that training the algorithm on populations of different races might help, but it’s still not clear how the algorithm could be extended to very diverse populations. I think more research would be necessary to deal with my daughter, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian baby.

The algorithm focused on the geometric (i.e. shape) of the face. It doesn’t attempt to smooth out blemishes or eliminate acne. Maybe this could be fixed through other computer graphics techniques, e.g. bilateral filtering. Click on the following image to see what a difference bilateral filtering can make:

To come back to the beautification algorithm, instead of trying to make the face look more similar to a given pattern, I think a better approach would be more subtle: focus on correcting obvious asymetries, combined with the bilateral filter.

PS: There are other techniques out there to make faces pretty.

This approach reportedly averages faces, then exagerates the feminity: Unfortunately I couldn’t find any screenshot.

Do you know of other cool techniques to make faces prettier? Or can you think of unusual applications or markets that could benefit from this kind of technology? If so, let us know! We’d love to have an excuse to experiment with these algorithms… to make our faces the world a prettier place.

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