Interactive Portrait Art

Traditionally, enjoying a portrait art, e.g. the Mona Lisa, is a passive activity. The spectator merely views the painting and admires the brush strokes, composition, etc. But now, with real-time computer vision and graphics algorithms, we can inject interactivity into portrait art, thereby bringing these art works back to life and giving a new dimension to art enjoyment. Specifically, in our art installation, a spectator is allowed to animate the face in a portrait art work to produce any expression she/he likes. The system consists of one personal computer and one camera. Given one frontal portrait picture as input, it generates an animation-ready avatar with minimum user intervention. The spectator then can perform before the camera any expression. And the system will capture the facial motion of the spectator and retarget the motion to the avatar. The animation of the avatar is rendered back to the original portrait picture. The motion retargetting is done in real-time.