Face Fusion: An Automatic Method For Virtual Plastic Surgery

This paper describes a system that replaces an individual's facial features with corresponding features of another individual -possibly of different skin color- and fuses the replaced features with the original face, such that the resulting face looks natural. The final face resulting from the fusion of the original face with exogenous features, lacks the characteristic discontinuities that would have been expected if only a replacement operation was performed. The proposed system could be used to simulate and predict the outcome of aesthetic maxillofacial plastic surgeries. To achieve its task, the system uses five modules: face detection, feature detection, replacement, shifting and blending. While these modules are designed to address the problem of face fusion, some of the novel algorithms and techniques introduced in this paper could be useful in other image processing and fusion applications