Face Detection for Automatic Avatar Creation by using Deformable Template and GA

In this paper, we propose a method to detect contours of a face, eyes, and a mouth of a person in the color image in order to make an avatar automatically. First, we use the HSI color model to exclude the effect of various light conditions, and find skin regions in the input image by using the skin color defined on HS-plane. And then, we use deformable templates and genetic algorithm (GA) to detect contours of a face, eyes, and a mouth. Deformable templates consist of B-spline curves and control point vectors. Those represent various shapes of a face, eyes and a mouth. GA is a very useful search algorithm based on the principals of natural selection and genetics. Second, the avatar is automatically created by using GA-detected contours and Fuzzy C-Means clustering (FCM). FCM is used to reduce the number of face colors. In result, we could create avatars which look like handmade caricatures representing user's identity. Our approach differs from those generated by existing methods.