Now, a computer that rates attractiveness in women!

{image-computer women_05042008.jpg news.oneindia.in}Washington, Apr 5 : You won't have to rely now on your spouse's fake compliments, if he makes any, to know how gorgeous a dress looks on you, for a computer has come to your rescue.

Tel Aviv University researchers have claimed that they have successfully "taught" a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women. In the study, Amit Kagian, a Masters in Science graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences along with co-authors Professor Eytan Ruppin and Professor Gideon Dror combined the worlds of computer programming and psychology to determine human aesthetic judgement.The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for the software could be in plastic and reconstructive surgery and computer visualization programs such as face recognition technologies. "Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions. But our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment. Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don't understand how they arrived at their conclusions," said Kagian.

In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face.

The subjects rated the images on a scale of one through seven and did not explain why they chose certain scores. Kagian and his colleagues then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically.

Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair colour was fed into the analysis as well. Based on human preferences, the machine 'learned' the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces.

"The computer produced impressive results - its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave," said Kagian.

This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it's as though the computer "learned" implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.

The study is published in the journal Vision Research.

ANI