Crafting Personalized Facial Avatars Using Editable Portrait and Photograph Example

Abstract

Computer-generated facial avatars have been increasingly used in a variety of virtual reality applications. Emulating the real-world face sculpting process, we present an interactive system to intuitively craft personalized 3D facial avatars by using 3D portrait editing and image example-based painting techniques. Starting from a default 3D face portrait, users can conveniently perform intuitive "pulling" operations on its 3D surface to sculpt the 3D face shape towards any individual. To automatically maintain the faceness of the 3D face being crafted, novel facial anthropometry constraints and a reduced face description space are incorporated into the crafting algorithms dynamically. Once the 3D face geometry is crafted, this system can automatically generate a face texture for the crafted model using an image example-based painting algorithm. Our user studies showed that with this system, users are able to craft a personalized 3D facial avatar efficiently on average within one minute.