Two key challenges lie in the facial attractiveness computation research: the lack of discriminative face representations, and the scarcity of sufficient and complete training data. Motivated by recent promising work in face recognition using deep neural networks to learn effective features, the first challenge is expected to be addressed from a deep learning point of view. A very deep residual network is utilized to enable automatic learning of hierarchical aesthetics representation. The inspiration to deal with the second challenge comes from the natural representation of the training data, where each training face can be associated with a label (score) distribution given by human raters rather than a single label (average score). This paper, therefore, recasts facial attractiveness computation as a label distribution learning problem. Integrating these two ideas, an end-to-end attractiveness learning framework is established. We also perform feature-level fusion by incorporating the low-level geometric features to further improve the computational performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on a standard benchmark, the SCUT-FBP dataset, where our approach shows significant advantages over the other state-of-the-art work.

Facial attractiveness prediction (FAP) aims to assess facial attractiveness automatically based on human aesthetic perception. Previous methods using deep convolutional neural networks have improved the performance, but their large-scale models have led to a deficiency in efficiency. In addition, most methods fail to take full advantage of the dataset. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end FAP approach that integrates dual label distribution and lightweight design. The manual ratings, attractiveness score, and standard deviation are aggregated explicitly to construct a dual-label distribution to make the best use of the dataset, including the attractiveness distribution and the rating distribution. Such distributions, as well as the attractiveness score, are optimized under a joint learning framework based on the label distribution learning (LDL) paradigm. The data processing is simplified to a minimum for a lightweight design, and MobileNetV2 is selected as our backbone. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, where our approach achieves promising results and succeeds in balancing performance and efficiency. Ablation studies demonstrate that our delicately designed learning modules are indispensable and correlated. Additionally, the visualization indicates that our approach can perceive facial attractiveness and capture attractive facial regions to facilitate semantic predictions. The code is available at https://github.com/enquan/2D_FAP .