Scientific approach to caricaturized portrait （Nigaoe） II

Development of technique for caricature creation using digital processing of human feelings

Abstract

Caricaturized portraits (Nigaoe, in Japanese) have a long history in Japan, extending from Nise-e in the Heian period to the present day. In recent years, computerized Nigaoe have also been developed. Computerized Nigaoe present benefits of objective extraction and exaggeration of morphological differences of a model's face from an average face. Nigaoe produced by a human creator are drawn with some reflection of the model's personality obtained through comprehensive observation of a model. To develop a new method for creating Nigaoe images that incorporate these important benefits of both computer and human creators, the following stimuli of three types were created by collecting the Nigaoe of 12 models created by 22 artists: (1) Digitized Nigaoe created by tracing the original drawings (original Nigaoe); (2) Nigaoe averaged from the original Nigaoe of individual models (individual average Nigaoe); and (3) Nigaoe that are extracted, with differences exaggerated from the standard template that is a re-averaged "individual average Nigaoe" (exaggerated Nigaoe). When the degrees of similarity of these Nigaoe stimuli of three types were compared through experimentation, similarity was evaluated as reflecting the following order: (3) exaggerated Nigaoe>(2) individual average Nigaoe>(1) original Nigaoe. The results demonstrate that this newly developed Nigaoe creation method can accumulate human-drawn portraits using rudimentary drawing software.