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A portrait photo-to-tattoo transform based on digital tattooing

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Abstract

Tattooing portraits of loved ones is a popular form of love expression and tribute. Tattooing portraits is complicated and challenging because of detailed facial expressions and unique characters of each person. Currently, it is hard for clients to give clear instructions on tattoo designs to tattooists, because there is no effective way to see a portrait tattoo before putting it on the body. In this paper, an algorithm which transforms a given portrait photo to a portrait tattoo is proposed. It takes a portrait photo, a reference portrait tattoo image, a skin image and a set of parameters as inputs. The portrait photo is the person’s face whom the client wants to put on his/her skin. The reference portrait tattoo image is used to control the color and style of the synthetic portrait tattoo. The skin image is taken from the skin region where the client wants to tattoo. By adjusting the parameters, portrait tattoos with different characteristics can be generated. The proposed algorithm uses a series of tailor-made image processing methods and a digital tattoo needle model to perform digital tattooing on the skin image. Comparing with the state-of-the-art style transfer methods, the proposed algorithm produces more realistic portrait tattoos.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore through Academic Research Fund Tier 1, RG30/17 (S).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Xingpeng Xu, Wojciech Michal Matkowski & Adams Wai Kin Kong

Authors
  1. Xingpeng Xu
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  2. Wojciech Michal Matkowski
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  3. Adams Wai Kin Kong
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Correspondence to Xingpeng Xu.

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Xu, X., Matkowski, W.M. & Kong, A.W.K. A portrait photo-to-tattoo transform based on digital tattooing. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 24367–24392 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09101-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09101-3

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