The human face conveys to other human beings, and potentially to computer systems, information such as identity, intentions, emotional and health states, attractiveness, age, gender and ethnicity. In most cases analyzing this information involves the computer science as well as the human and medical sciences. The most studied multidisciplinary problems are analyzing emotions, estimating age and modeling aging effects. An emerging area is the analysis of human attractiveness. The purpose of this paper is to survey recent research on the computer analysis of human beauty. First we present results in human sciences and medicine pointing to a largely shared and datadriven perception of attractiveness, which is a rationale of computer beauty analysis. After discussing practical application areas, we survey current studies on the automatic analysis of facial attractiveness aimed at: i) relating attractiveness to particular facial features; ii) assessing attractiveness automatically; iii) improving the attractiveness of 2D or 3D face images. Finally we discuss open problems and possible lines of research.Index Terms-Face image analysis, face attractiveness, facial features, machine beauty analysis
Introduction: Face Analysis ProblemsThe analysis of 2D or 3D images of humans is a main research topic in pattern analysis and computer vision.Applications exist, or are forecast, in a number of areas such as identity verification, natural man-machine interfaces, surveillance, forensics, sport performance enhancement, medical diagnosis and treatments.Special attention has been devoted to the images of hands ([175], [122]) and faces, the tools of most humanenvironment interaction. In particular, the human face is by far the part of the body which conveys most information to human beings, and thus potentially to computer systems ([108], [120]). Such information includes identity, intentions, health and emotional states, attractiveness, age, gender, ethnicity, attention and personality traits. In several cases the analysis of this information is a multidisciplinary problem, involving areas of computer science (such as pattern analysis and computer vision), human science (such as psychology, behavioral and cognitive sciences), and medicine.At present, the most studied and successful application of face image analysis is identity recognition or
