Researchers have built what they claim is a beauty machine that, with just the press of a button, can turn a picture of an ordinary face into that of a cover model.
"Beauty, contrary to what most people think, is not simply in the eye of the beholder. With the aid of computers, attractiveness can be objectified and boiled down to a function of mathematical distances or ratios.
"This function is the basis for the beauty machine," lead researcher Prof Daniel Cohen-Or of Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences said.
In fact, in their study, the researchers surveyed 68 Israeli and German men and women, aged 25 to 40, asking them to rank the beauty of 93 different people's faces on a scale of one to 7.
These scores were then entered into a database and correlated to 250 different measurements and facial features, such as ratios of the nose, chin and distance from ears to eyes.
From this, the researchers created an algorithm that applies desirable elements of attractiveness to a fresh image.
And, unlike heavily processed Photoshop images that can make magazine cover models and celebrities unrecognisable, the university's "beautification engine" is much more subtle as the final image it produces retains a similarity to the original picture, the 'ScienceDaily' reported.
However, while its output is currently limited to digitised images, the software may be able to guide plastic surgeons, aid magazine cover editors, and even become a feature incorporated into all digital cameras.
The findings are published in the latest edition of the 'Proceedings of Siggraph'.
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