Automatic view based caricaturing

This paper describes a new method for the automatic view based generation of caricatures using image operators and lending itself to parallel implementation. This work is motivated by the need for a realistic and automatic caricaturing process for both human studies related to understanding why caricatures are recognized better than real images, and automatic face recognition. The proposed method determines how the valleys of an image should be distorted in order to obtain a caricature. The propagation of this sparse transformation to the full image provides a dense and smooth deformation field that, when it is properly applied, yields a realistic face caricature. The new caricaturing method does not require manual annotation and yields more realistic images due to the dense and smooth deformation field. A new shape and texture descriptor for representing faces based on the new caricatured image is also proposed for face recognition