In 1973, Herman Chernoff introduced a visualization technique to illustrate trends in multidimensional data. His Chernoff Faces were especially effective because they related the data to facial features, something which we are used to differentiating between. Different data dimensions were mapped to different facial features, for example the face width, the level of the ears, the radius of the ears, the length or curvature of the mouth, the length of the nose, etc.

Here, the faces are described by 10 facial characteristic parameters: 1. head eccentricity, 2. eye eccentricity, 3. pupil size, 4. eyebrow slant, 5. nose size, 6. mouth shape, 7. eye spacing, 8. eye size, 9. mouth length, and 10. degree of mouth opening. Each parameter is represented by a number between 0 and 1.

The power of Chernoff face is its high condensation of data