Novel Multi-Feature Fusion Facial Aesthetic Analysis Framework

Abstract

Machine learning has been used in facial beauty prediction studies. However, the integrity of facial geometric information is not considered in facial aesthetic feature extraction, and the impact of other facial attributes (expression) on aesthetics. We propose a novel multi-feature fusion facial aesthetic analysis framework (NMFA) to overcome this problem. First, we designed a facial shape feature, which is an intuitive, visual quantitative description, based on B-spline. Second, we designed a representative low-dimensional facial structural feature to establish the theoretical basis of the facial structure, based on facial aesthetic structure and expression recognition theory. Next, we designed texture and holistic features based on Gabor and VGG-face network. Finally, we used a multi-feature fusion strategy to fuse them for aesthetic evaluation. Experiments were conducted on four databases. The results revealed that the proposed method realizes the visualization of facial shape features, enriches geometric information, solves the problem of lack of facial geometric information and difficulty to understand, and achieves excellent performance with fewer parameters.