Face Image Metamorphosis with an Improved Multilevel B-Spline Approximation

Image metamorphosis is an important visual effect tool in entertainment industry and other research field. To date many morphing algorithms have been proposed and used such as mesh warping, radial basis functions, thin plate splines and B-Splines (free-form deformations). In particular, the free-form deformation based on B-Spline approximation is a powerful and useful morphing algorithm and is proven to have the one-to-one property which can prevent the warped image from folding back upon itself. In order to minimize the morphing error, a multilevel B-spline approximation has been proposed. Though a natural and smooth morphed image can be obtained by using the multilevel B-spline approximation, it takes a large computation cost. In this paper, we proposed an improved multilevel B-spline approximation method in order to reduce the large computation cost. We propose a lattice integration method and an adaptive lattice method for multilevel approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more efficient than conventional multilevel B-spline method.