Computer analysis of face beauty: A survey

•Analyzing beauty with pattern analysis techniques is an emerging research field.•Applications of machine beauty analysis are reviewed.•Computer-based beauty analysis is surveyed.•Possible future direction of research are discussed.

The human face conveys to other human beings, and potentially to computer systems, information such as identity, intentions, emotional and health states, attractiveness, age, gender and ethnicity. In most cases analyzing this information involves the computer science as well as the human and medical sciences. The most studied multidisciplinary problems are analyzing emotions, estimating age and modeling aging effects. An emerging area is the analysis of human attractiveness. The purpose of this paper is to survey recent research on the computer analysis of human beauty. First we present results in human sciences and medicine pointing to a largely shared and data-driven perception of attractiveness, which is a rationale of computer beauty analysis. After discussing practical application areas, we survey current studies on the automatic analysis of facial attractiveness aimed at: (i) relating attractiveness to particular facial features; (ii) assessing attractiveness automatically; (iii) improving the attractiveness of 2D or 3D face images. Finally we discuss open problems and possible lines of research.