Cartoon-like avatar generation using facial component matching

Abstract

Nowadays, avatars are widely used in games and Internet environments. Especially, video game consoles such as Wii (Nintendo) use avatars for representing the user's alter ego. There are several ways to generate avatars. Most existing games or Internet services provide manual systems for generating avatars. Many researchers have suggested automatic avatar generation methods, most of which generate avatars by simplifying images using non-photorealistic rendering techniques. In this research, we suggest an example-based method that generates avatars by first matching the most similar avatar components for each facial feature and compositing them. We built a system that generates an avatar which is similar to the input front-view photograph by matching each facial feature to the corresponding feature of the avatar. The system first extracts six facial features from the input image: 2 eyes, 2 eyebrows, a mouth, and a face outline. Then it matches them to the corresponding avatar components using graph similarity and Hausdorff distance. Finally, the system generates an avatar by compositing the most similar components. We have also experimented on the effectiveness of our approach, and the results show that our system generates avatars which successfully represent their corresponding photographs.