You’re more than a pretty face; no airbrushing needed

Look at the first set of photos on this page, chances are you will find the faces on the right hand side more attractive. Now take a closer look at the differences between the left and right hand side images, in particular the eyes and months of the subjects.

It’s called “Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness”…

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.

Notice also the apparent absence of any major airbrushing, “improvements” have mostly been made by only slightly adjusting one or two facial features.