My roomie is a photographer, and I’m always amazed at the efforts he puts in at enhancing his images on photo editing programs. He retouches the light balance, takes off blemishes, plays around with the contrast and all sorts of other technical stuff, ultimately producing a whole other piece of art on top of the original image. It takes skill and patience – often he’ll sit for hours and hours squinting at the computer, spending more time retouching than taking the original image.

Three computer scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel may have a shortcut that could prove itself to be very useful – ‘The Beauty Function’, which was recently introduced at a conference in Boston.

According to these researchers, Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder,” says Cohen-Or. “Beauty is merely a function of mathematical distances or ratios. And interestingly,” he adds, “It is usually the average distances to features which appears to most people to be the most beautiful.”

After surveying men and women on what they view as beautiful, they used the ratings the individuals gave certain images and correlated them to detailed measurements and ratios of facial features such as nose width, chin length and distance from eyes to ears. They then developed an algorithm that could let them apply some of the desired elements of attractiveness - as mathematical equations - to a fresh image.

The result? A computer program that can beautify an image, within minutes…

Read more here.

Related posts

• No related posts.