A template-based approach to automatic face enhancement

This paper presents Visual ENhancement of USers (VENUS), a system able to automatically enhance male and female frontal facial images exploiting a database of celebrities as reference patterns for attractiveness. Each face is represented by a set of landmark points that can be manually selected or automatically localized using active shape models. The faces can be compared remapping the landmarks by means of Catmull-Rom splines, a class of interpolating splines particularly useful to extract shape-based representations. Given the input image, its landmarks are compared against the known beauty templates and moved towards the K-nearest ones by 2D image warping. The VENUS performances have been evaluated by 20 volunteers on a set of images collected during the Festival of Creativity, held in Florence, Italy, on October 2007. The experiments show that the 73.9% of the beautified faces are more attractive than the original pictures.