Daily Report: Digital Makeovers - New York Times (blog)

Body image and tech?

In Tuesday's Times, Steve Lohr writes about a new software tool that can detect to what extent beauty and fashion photos have been retouched, ranking them on a 1-to-5 scale. Developed by a Dartmouth computer science professor and his graduate student, the software uses an algorithm that "statistically measures how much the image of a person's face and body has been altered," the article says.

In their research, the academics recruited hundreds of people online and asked them to compare sets of before-and-after pictures to establish the 1-to-5 scale of touchups. The human rankings were used to train the software.

The professor, Hany Farid, who is also a digital forensics expert, became interested in the issue after reading about proposals by feminist legislators in Europe that digitally altered photos be labeled, as a kind of truth in advertising and a way to combat unrealistic notions of body image.

Idealized photographs of models and celebrities have been a concern for awhile among psychologists and others, who say they could lead to problems like eating disorders, especially among younger women. The Web site Jezebel has run many articles on retouching photographs, which it has called "one of America's growing industries."

Publications commenting on the Dartmouth research include The Economist blog and Nature. The Independent had a little fun with its headline: "I'm Ready for My Touchup."