Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness

ACM SIGGRAPH 2008

Abstract :

When human raters are presented with a collection of shapes and asked to rank them according to their aesthetic appeal, the results

often indicate that there is a statistical consensus among the raters. Yet it might be difficult to define a succinct set of rules that capture the aesthetic preferences of the raters. In this work, we explore a data-driven approach to aesthetic enhancement of such shapes. Specifically, we focus on the challenging problem of enhancing the aesthetic appeal (or the attractiveness) of human faces in frontal photographs (portraits), while maintaining close similarity with the original.



The key component in our approach is an automatic facial attractiveness engine trained on datasets of faces with accompanying facial attractiveness ratings collected from groups of human raters. Given a new face, we extract a set of distances between a variety of facial feature locations, which define a point in a high-dimensional “face space”. We then search the face space for a nearby point with a higher predicted attractiveness rating. Once such a point is found, the corresponding facial distances are embedded in the plane and serve as a target to define a 2D warp field which maps the original facial features to their adjusted locations. The effectiveness of our technique was experimentally validated by independent rating experiments, which indicate that it is indeed capable of increasing the facial attractiveness of most portraits that we have experimented with.

SIGGRAPH 2006 "Digital Face Beautification" sketch page is still available here.

Download:

SIGGRAPH 2008 Paper (13MB, PDF)

SIGGRAPH 2008 Video* (on YouTube)



SIGGRAPH 2008 Video* (download 66MB, DivX)

Related links:

New York Times Article (10/09/2008)



TV Segment on King5 Evening Magazine (11/26/2008)

BibTeX entry:

@article{Leyvand:2008:Attractiveness, author = {Tommer Leyvand and Daniel Cohen-Or and Gideon Dror and Dani Lischinski}, title = {Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008)}, volume = 27, number = 3, month = aug, year = 2008, }

Additional Results :

A few results demonstrating our digital face beautification technique on both women and men:

Input images on the top row and their corresponding results on the bottom row.

Application screenshots:

Acknowledgments: * Input images courtesy of © Akira Gomi and © AR face database

* Thanks to David Logan for the video voice over.