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

Abstract Recent work in the psychological literature has indicated that attractive faces are in some ways “average” [J.H. Langlois, L.A. Roggman, Attractive faces 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 of a computationally derived “face space” [A.J. O'Toole, T. Vetter, H. Volz, E.M. Salter, Three-dimensional caricatures of human heads: distinctiveness and the perception of facial age, Perception, 26 (1997) 719–732]. We examined the relationship between facial attractiveness, age, and “averageness”, using laser scans of faces that were put into complete correspondence with the average face [T. Vetter, V. Blanz, Estimating coloured 3D face models from single images: an example based approach, in: H. Burkhardt, B. Neumann (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Computer Vision, Freiburg, 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 individual faces onto the average head shape, and texture-normalized faces, created by morphing the average texture onto the shape of each individual face, were judged by human subjects to be both more attractive and younger than the original faces. The study shows that relatively global, psychologically meaningful attributes of faces can be modeled very simply in face spaces of this sort.