Interactive Evolutionary System for Synthesizing Facial Caricature with Non-planar Expression

Abstract

A method to synthesize facial caricatures with non-planar expression is proposed. Several methods have been already proposed to synthesize facial caricatures automatically, but they mainly synthesize plane facial caricatures which look somewhat monotonous. In order to generate expressive facial caricature, the image should be expressed in non-planar style, expressing the depth of the face by shading and highlighting. In this paper, a new method to express such non-planar effect in facial caricatures is proposed by blending the grayscale information of the real face image into the plane caricature. Some methods also have been proposed to generate non-planar facial caricature, but the proposed method can adjust the degree of non-planar expression by interactive evolutionary computing, so that the obtained expression is satisfied by the user based on his/her subjective criteria. Since the color of the face looks changed, when the grayscale information of the natural face image is mixed, the color information of the skin area are also set by interactive evolutionary computing. Experimental results show the high performance of the proposed method.