The NIGAO Interactive Facial Caricature Drawing System

Abstract

A caricature can express an artist's impression of the target face.We propose an interactive facial caricature drawing system "NIGAO".Our aim is to create a system that can be used by anyone to synthesize a caricature with one's impression of the target face.NIGAO has two modes:"selection and adjustment of facial parts mode",in which the user can directly manipulate the location or geometry of facial parts,and "interactive genetic algorithm (IGA) mode",in which he or she can use [facial characteristics from] a group of caricatures to influence her desired caricature by selecting some of them as the dominant genes.Users can switch between modes when needed.We let 15 users imagine the faces of two famous people and synthesize their caricatures using NIGAO.Results of this experiment show that a caricature synthesized using the latter mode after using the former mode reflects the artist's impression of the target face better than caricatures synthesized using only the former mode.These results also demonstrate the effectiveness of NIGAO's interface for synthesizing caricatures.