Example-Based Automatic Caricature Generation

Caricature is a popular artistic media widely used for effective communications. The fascination of caricature lies in its expressive depiction of a person´s prominent features, which is usually realized through the so called exaggeration technique. This paper proposes a new example based automatic caricature generation system supporting the exaggeration of visual appearance features. The system comprises the construction of a learning database and the generation of caricatures. The construction of the learning database links the pairs of facial images and corresponding caricatures. Given an input face, the system automatically compute the feature vectors of facial parts and hairstyle, and search the learning database for the exaggerated parts by using the most prominent features. Experimental results show that our system can achieve the control over the degree of exaggeration and the exaggerated results can better represent the features of the subjects.