A face cartoon producer for digital content service

Abstract

Reproducing face cartoon has the potential to be an important digital content service which could be widely used in mobile communication. Here, a face cartoon producer named "NatureFace", integrated with some novel techniques, is introduced. To generate a face cartoon for a given face involves proper modeling for face, and efficient representation and rendering for cartoon. For both face and cartoon, new definition are introduced for modeling. For face modeling, it is the reference shape; while for cartoons, the painting pattern for corresponding cartoon. Sufficient samples are collected for two parts from the materials supplied by invited artists according to the pre-assigned artistic styles. Given an input face image, the process for generating cartoon has the following steps. First shape features are extracted. Then, painting entities for facial components are selected and deformed to fit current face. Finally, the cartoon rendering engine synthesizes painting entities with rendering rules originated from designated artistic style, resulting in the cartoon. To validate the proposed algorithm, cartoons generated for a group of face images with rare interaction are evaluated and ranked in an artistic style way. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.