The 3D caricature face modeling based on aesthetic formulae

Recently automatic 3D caricature face generation has attracted much attention from both the research community and the game industry. With the developing of computer vision and modeling, it has become the key technique of virtual avatar and computer games. Let the cartoon face resemble the realistic picture to be customized avatar standing for the user himself. Then the cartoon face also has some exaggeration that can protect the privacy while transmitting through internet. Although it has received considerable attention in computer graphics, due to the lack of 3D caricature sample that many current 3D caricature generation systems required, it still remains as a challenge to generate a satisfactory caricature face model. 3D cartoon face model can be generated from an ordinary frontal face photograph in this paper. We first use an improved ASM to detect the face feature points and receive the different face components region and their distribution. Then transform the face components shape and face contour according to the mean art exaggerate formulae by manifold RBF. The face texture can be transformed from real picture to cartoon one by PCA. Finally, we implement a prototype system that can transform the ordinary face picture into some real and caricature model that can be applied successfully in multi-user educational game to provide human-like avatars. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by the experimental results.