Caricature Creation with Conformal Mapping in Complex Domain

Abstract

Caricature is an art form of exaggeration of features [Akleman 1997; Akleman et al. 2000; Akleman and Reisch 2004; Brennan 1985; Klare et al. 2012; Liang et al. 2002]. An important property of feature exaggeration is that it is not deformation. By deforming features we can obtain funny looking portraits, however the resulting features will not look exaggerated. In this work, we present an approach for extreme exaggeration of facial features to obtain caricature effect. Our approach is based on the well-known conformal property of maps in complex domains. Namely, any map in a complex domain is angle preserving, which is crucial for caricature generation. Without angle preservation, the maps can result in deformations that look funny or grotesque, but not caricature. We have developed a particular mapping in a complex domain and show that we can obtain a wide variety of faces starting from any illustration (or photograph) of a human face.