Automatic Facial Image Manipulation System and Facial Texture Analysis

Image warping and morphing are important visual effect tools in entertainment industry and other research fields. We developed a prototypical automatic facial image manipulation system (AFIM) for face morphing and shape normalization (warping). In our AFIM system, there are two main functions: (1) warping a facial image to a target image (face shape normalization), (2) generation of inter- or intra-personal face by morphing between faces of different people or different faces of an individual. Image morphing is done by mesh warping scheme or multilevel B-spline approximation. The feature points are extracted by using active shape model (automatic extraction) or by manually. As an application, the AFIM is applied to statistical facial texture analysis. We first use AFIM to normalize the face shape in the facial database and then applied principal component analysis (PCA) to the shape-normalized facial images in order to analysis the texture of facial images statistically.