Facial Prototyping

Facial prototyping can be broken up into 3 stages: delineation of face shape, calculating the average shape for a group of faces and warping the faces into that shape, then blending images together to provide an image with the average colouration of the group of faces.
These steps are illustrated below.

1.Delineation

The co-ordinates of standardised feature positions are logged.

Fig.1
A face with the feature points marked on.

2. Calculation of the average face shape

The average x,y co-ordinates of the points marking out each feature are found for the group of faces.

Fig.2
The delineation data illustrated in line form showing the shape of 3 of the 60 faces that went into the average(right).

3. Warping the faces into the average face shape.

Images of faces can easily be superimposed and blended together:

Fig.3
Three of original 60 images which were superimposed to make the image on the right.

Warping the faces to the same average face shape before blending together produces a clear image.

Fig.4
The three example faces on the left have been warped so that their features are in the same position. They were then superimposed along with 57 other faces which had been warped into the same shape to produce the blend on the right.

For more information on these techniques please see:

Rowland D.A., Perrett D.I., Burt D.M., Lee K.J. & Akamatsu S. (1997) Transforming Facial Images in 2 and 3-D. Imaging 97 Proceedings, Monte-Carlo, pp159-175. A pre-publication version of the paper is available in Acrobat pdf format .

Rowland D. & Perrett D.I. (1995) Manipulationg Facial Appearance through Shape and Color. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 15, 5, 70-76.
The paper is available in Acrobat pdf format.

P.J. Benson, D.I. Perrett (1993) Extracting prototypical facial images from exemplars. Perception, 22, 257-262. abstract

Images and text Copyright 1995, The Perception Lab, University of St Andrews

Attractiveness / dmb@st-and.ac.uk

 

 

 

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