Background:

Morphing is a simultaneous warp of shape and cross-dissolve of color for two images. Cross-dissolve is relatively easy, since we can just weigh the pixels from two images differently. However, warping is hard as we need to define (hand-labeled) correspondence and triangulate the images, and interp2 the pixel values. In this project, we will look into the different steps in this amazingly interesting technique

Part 1: Defining Correspondences

This part is quite straighforward, as I just fire up Matlab and use the cpselect functionality to define the correspondance.

Defining correspondences with Matlab's cpselect

Part 2: Computing the "Mid-way Face"

This part, I first implemented the A = computeAffine(tri1_pts,tri2_pts) function, which compute the affine transformation from one triangle to the second, with the geometric method mentioned by Prof. Efros in lecture

Affine transformation: geometric intuition

Then I implemented morphed_im(im1Name, im2Name, im1Pts, im2Pts, TRI, warp_frac, dissolve_frac) function which morph two images based on the corresponding points, triangulation, and warp/cross-dissolve fraction

The "Mid-way Face"

Myself

Mid-way face

George Clooney

Part 3: The Morph Sequence

The Morph Sequence was generated with 19 frames between myself and George Clooney. I generated the gif to go both forward and backwards

The Morph Sequence between myself and George Clooney

Part 4: The "Mean face" of a population

I chose the Danes Dataset to do this part of the project. It was a bit difficult to parse the *.asf files to the desired format and label my image consistently with their labeling. I wrote my own helper function read_points(asfname) to parse the asf file and morph_mean(dirname, gender) to perform the actual morphing.

Another difficulty I encountered was that, the parts of image that is not covered by any triangle is morphed very poorly. But after I add the four corners to all the cooresponding points, the issue was resolved.

The Mean face of the Danish Computer Scientists

Mean Face

We can morph some faces in the dataset to the average shape

Original image: 18

18 morphed to shape of mean face

Original image: 35

35 morphed to shape of mean face

Original image: 40

40 morphed to shape of mean face

Here are some examples of my image, when playing around with the Danish Computer Scientists

Selecting corresponding points

Original image: myself

My face morphed to the geometry of mean face of the Danes (ohoh)

Mean face of the Danes morphed to geometry of my face (hmm)

Apparently, I am not that Danish at all. lol

Part 5: Caricatures: Extrapolating from the mean

So apparaently it is possible to produce a caricature of my face by extrapolating from the population mean.

Original image

Caricature with 20% increase in my geometry

Caricature with 50% increase in my geometry (sad lol)

Bells and Whistles:

Bells and Whistles 1: Change gender of my face

I computed the mean of male, and female Danish Computer Scientists respectively, found the difference in geometry and applied the same shape transformation to my geometry to get the "shape only" transformation

Female mean face

Male mean face

Original image

"Shape only" transformation

"Color only" transformation

Both shape and color transformation

Bells and Whistles 2: Class Video Contribution

The picture submitted

Point labeling