On a broader point though, the human taste for "average-looking" faces is an interesting one. Aside from anything else it's an interesting Nash equilibrium -- I want to find a mate with an average-looking face so that we can produce children with average-looking faces who will be the most desirable breeding partners in the next generation.
What I really wonder is whether "average-looking" is hard-wired in, or whether we're programmed to spend our childhood scanning all the faces around us and mentally averaging them out to determine what a human face should look like. I suspect the latter -- it's a much more stable strategy over evolutionary timescales, and also explains things like why people often find people of their own race more attractive, and why mixed-race people are often unusually attractive.
Isn't it a wrong Nash equilibrium? You should choose a mate with someone on the other side of "average", so your children will have average faces. An average face and your (more likely than not) non-average face do not make average faces.
This "other side of average" effect is to some extent seen with the major histocompatibility complex.
We do have a strong preference for symmetrical faces, maybe because that indicates you've been very healthy for many years.
And averaging out a bunch of non-perfectly symmetrical faces, results in a very symmetrical face.
But that's very different from average. We strongly prefer decidedly rare features showing off high levels of sex hormones. An average face would have average sized eyes for example, but we prefer bigger eyes which indicate youth.
But I 100% agree with you on having a picture of your better looking twin, no thanks.
Would be some fun engineering and probably pretty popular.
then used the golden mask to calculate an
objective attractiveness score
A much better project would be a piece of software that automatically enhances the aesthetic appeal of people in photos. Imagine looking great in any profile picture you upload on Facebook (or whatever), without you or your friends noticing the change (blaming it on distortions from image resizing).
http://www.mendeley.com/research/female-preference-for-male-...
http://journal.nida.ac.th/journal/attachments/8_Sunthorn%20K...
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/108/3/233/
Also would provide an option for you to rate 10-20 and give a personal rating.
It is just a random number generator though.
Idea was that you could get an objective "hotness" or attractiveness rating based on how well your features fit the golden ratio / golden mask. It would also give users preferences when they first use the app (eg against 10-20 faces, which you can have precalculated all the points accurately), you can map each face against their preferred faces, giving the personalised rating system.
Use case at a pub/bar quick scan of the iphone would give a objective rating and your rating.
V2. could add location and start building real time tracking of where the hot women / men or those matching closer to your rating were going tonight :)
In the Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks says that to go from a prototype that does everything you want, to one with nice packaging, takes 3x the effort. I'm not sure about the 3x number, but it does take a lot of effort.
The software is out there, I'll link some if you want. What you are really looking for is the training data used to create the faces though. That is where the money is.
This was the best application I have heard for similar research. Not so much for the money aspect but for the good it did.
Needless to say, yes, some of them do need this.
[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile..., "Myth 1"
Perhaps this is because a smile indicates a positive/friendly demeanor?
I always had the best impression of women with whom I worked/studied with were the ones who were warm to me.
Perhaps beauty does come from the inside?
True beauty comes from inside. My grandparents weren't terribly attractive... but I'll never forget my grandfather's smile. When he smiled it lit his face in such a powerful way I can see him even now (he's been dead almost 9 years!).
And I don't think that women looking "flirty" is attractive. Looks more predatory to me.
I don't see it there, but also correcting asymmetry helps as well.
Active Appearance Models are a extension of Active Shape Modeling, effectively taking a set of landmark points on a shape (in this case a face), and averaging them out to the 'average shape' of the face. AAMs take it to the next level by taking this average face and warping the original landmarked face to the average shape. From here it takes the average of the textures of the face, producing eigenvectors. These vectors would be used as a unique identifier if the program was running some form of face recognition.
In lieu of face recognition something you can use the averaged AAM face for it recreating a face BASED off the average (say for this paper's example: beauty). By generating an averaged AAM model off only those subjects that scored an 8 (out of 10) or above, you create the 'average attractive face'.
Now, if you take John Doe's face with a score 5, and generate the eigenvectors that would represent his face based on the 'Good-Looking People Only Scale', it would create a better looking version of him.
Another application of this technique is digital face aging (example here: http://www.intechopen.com/source/pdfs/14645/InTech-Implicati...) in which instead of 'morphing' the subject's face to look more attractive, you morph the subject's to look 'older' based on statistical averages based on age range, gender, and ethnicity.