Scientists have built a new method based on artificial intelligence (AI), through mapping the elements of a smile that can easily differentiate between men and women.
Specialists from the University of Bradford, UK mapped 49 landmarks on the face, mostly around the eyes, mouth and down the nose. Through these mappings they evaluated changes in the face caused by the causal muscle movements when we smile – incorporating both changes in distances between the diverse points and the ‘flow’ of the smile: how much, how far and how fast the diverse points on the face moved with the formation of the smile. Furthermore, they tested whether there were evident dissimilarities between men and women – and found that there were, with women’s smiles being more extensive.
Professor Hassan Ugail from the University of Bradford said, “Anecdotally, women are thought to be more expressive in how they smile, and our research has borne this out. Women definitely have broader smiles, expanding their mouth and lip area far more than men.”
As published in The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics, for this study the researchers formed an algorithm with help of their analysis and tested it against video footage of 109 people as they smiled. The computer accurately determined sex in 86 % of cases and the team think that the accuracy could be improved easily.
“Because this system measures the underlying muscle movement of the face during a smile, we believe these dynamics will remain the same even if external physical features change, following surgery for example,” Ugail said.
“This kind of facial recognition could become a next-generation biometric, as it’s not dependent on one feature, but on a dynamic that’s unique to an individual and would be very difficult to mimic or alter,” he added.