Frontal and Semi-Frontal Facial Caricature Synthesis Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

In this paper, we present a novel approach to synthesizing frontal and semi-frontal cartoon-like facial caricatures from an image. The caricature is generated by warping the input face from the original feature points to the corresponding exaggerated feature points. A 3D mean face model is incorporated to facilitate face to caricatures by inferring the depth of 3D feature points and the spatial transformation. Then the 3D face is deformed by using non-negative matrix factorization and projected back to image plane for future warping. To efficiently solve the nonlinear spatial transformation, we propose a novel initialization scheme to set up Levenberg-Marquardt optimization. According to the spatial transformation, exaggeration is applied to the most salient features by exaggerating their normalized difference from the mean. Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) based stylization completes the cartoon caricature. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of view angles and aesthetic visual quality.