Semi-Automatic Creation of an Anime-Like 3D Face Model from a Single Illustration

In this paper, we propose a method for semi-automatically creating an anime-like 3D face model from a single illustration. In the proposed method, principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to existing anime-like 3D models to obtain base models for generating natural 3D models. To align the dimensions of the data and make geometric correspondence, a template model is deformed using a modified Nonrigid Iterative Closest Point (NICP) method. Then, the coefficients of the linear combination of the base models are estimated by minimizing the difference between the rendered image of the 3D model with the coefficients and the input illustration using edge-based matching. We confirmed that our method was able to generate a natural anime-like 3D face models which has similar eye and face shapes to those of the input illustration.