Author’s version Published in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 6111 LNCS, Issue PART 1, 2010, Pages 425-435 The analysis of facial beauty: an emerging area of research in pattern analysis Andrea Bottino and Aldo Laurentini 1 , 1 Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy {andrea.bottino, aldo.laurentini}@polito.it Abstract. Much research presented recently supports the idea that the human perception of attractiveness is data- driven and largely irrespective of the perceiver. This suggests using pattern analysis techniques for beauty analysis. Several scientific papers on this subject are appearing in image processing, computer vision and pattern analysis contexts, or use techniques of these areas. In this paper, we will survey the recent studies on automatic analysis of facial beauty, and discuss research lines and practical applications. Keywords: Face image analysis, facial landmarks, attractiveness. 1 Introduction Analyzing 2D or 3D images of humans is a main area of research in pattern analysis and computer vision. The human face is by far the part of the body which conveys more information to human beings, and thus potentially to computer systems [2]. Such information span identity, intentions, emotional and health states, attractiveness, age, gender, ethnicity, attention, etc. At present, the most studied application of face image analysis is identity recognition [1], which is essentially an engineering deformable object recognition problem. Other face image analysis applications are multidisciplinary and related to human sciences and medicine. They are essentially 1) analyzing human expressions, and 2) analyzing face attractiveness. The first is by far the most studied problem, particularly to capture human expression for animating the faces of virtual characters. A much more challenging problem is interpreting facial expressions, that is mapping expressions onto emotional states [2], [3]. The results presented are not yet convincing, since tracing backward the path from expressions (effects) to the emotions (causes), requires a shared and coherent model of the human emotions and of their effects on facial features, which psychophysiology has not yet supplied [3]. The second multidisciplinary problem, that is the analysis of human beauty and its measure, has been widely debated for centuries in human science, and, more recently, in plastic surgery and orthodontics. In the last decades, several thousands of papers on this subject have been published in these areas. The human science researchers involved in these studies are: social and developmental psychologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists and biologists. Applying pattern analysis and computer vision techniques for analyzing beauty is a relatively new research field. The purpose of this paper is to survey rationale, techniques, results, applications and open problems in this emerging area.