Imagine if computers get to judge a woman's beauty!

This imagination seems to have turned into a reality as scientists in Israel have successfully taught computers to interpret attractiveness in women.

''Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions, but our software lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment,'' researcher Amit Kagian from the Tel Aviv University said.

In the first step of the study, 30 men and women were presented with 100 different faces of Caucasian women, roughly of the same age, and were asked to judge the beauty of each face. The subjects rated the images on a scale of 1 through 7 and did not explain why they chose certain scores.

''Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don't understand how they arrived at their conclusions,'' Kagian said.

He and his colleagues then went to the computer and processed and mapped the geometric shape of facial features mathematically.

Additional features such as face symmetry, smoothness of the skin and hair colour were fed into the analysis as well.

Based on human preferences, the machine 'learned' the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a fresh set of faces, as reported by Science Daily.

''The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave,'' Kagian said.

This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it's as though the computer learned implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.