Facial Skin Beautification Using Adaptive Region-Aware Masks

In this paper, we propose a unified facial beautification framework with respect to skin homogeneity, lighting, and color. A novel region-aware mask is constructed for skin manipulation, which can automatically select the edited regions with great precision. Inspired by the state-of-the-art edit propagation techniques, we present an adaptive edge-preserving energy minimization model with a spatially variant parameter and a high-dimensional guided feature space for mask generation. Using region-aware masks, our method facilitates more flexible and accurate facial skin enhancement while the complex manipulations are simplified considerably. In our beautification framework, a portrait is decomposed into smoothness, lighting, and color layers by an edge-preserving operator. Next, facial landmarks and significant features are extracted as input constraints for mask generation. After three region-aware masks have been obtained, a user can perform facial beautification simply by adjusting the skin parameters. Furthermore, the combinations of parameters can be optimized automatically, depending on the data priors and psychological knowledge. We performed both qualitative and quantitative evaluation for our method using faces with different genders, races, ages, poses, and backgrounds from various databases. The experimental results demonstrate that our technique is superior to previous methods and comparable to commercial systems, for example, PicTreat, Portrait+, and Portraiture.