3D shape and 2D surface textures of human faces: the role of "averages" inattractiveness and age

Recent work in the psychological literature has indicated that attractive f aces are in some ways "average" [J.H. Langlois, L.A. Roggman, Attractive fa ces are only average, Psychological Science, 1(2) (1990) 115-121] and that the apparent age of a face can be related to its proximity to the average o f a computationally derived "face space" [A.J. O'Toole, T. Vetter, H. Volt, E.M. Salter, Three-dimensional caricatures of human heads: distinctiveness and the perception of facial age, Perception, 26 (1997) 719-732]. We exami ned the relationship between facial attractiveness, age, and "averageness", using laser scans effaces that were put into complete correspondence with the average face [T. Vetter, V. Blanz, Estimating coloured 3D face models f rom single images: an example based approach, in: H. Burkhardt, B. Neumann (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Computer Vision, Fr eiburg, Germany, 1998, pp. 499-513]. This representation enabled selective normalization of the 3D shape versus the surface texture map of the faces. Shape-normalized faces, created by morphing the texture maps from individua l faces onto the average head shape, and texture-normalized faces, created by morphing the average texture onto the shape of each individual face, wer e judged by human subjects to be both more attractive and younger than the original faces. The study shows that relatively global, psychologically mea ningful attributes of faces can be modeled very simply in face spaces of th is sort. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.