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A template-based approach to automatic face enhancement

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Abstract

This paper presents Visual ENhancement of USers (VENUS), a system able to automatically enhance male and female frontal facial images exploiting a database of celebrities as reference patterns for attractiveness. Each face is represented by a set of landmark points that can be manually selected or automatically localized using active shape models. The faces can be compared remapping the landmarks by means of Catmull–Rom splines, a class of interpolating splines particularly useful to extract shape-based representations. Given the input image, its landmarks are compared against the known beauty templates and moved towards the K-nearest ones by 2D image warping. The VENUS performances have been evaluated by 20 volunteers on a set of images collected during the Festival of Creativity, held in Florence, Italy, on October 2007. The experiments show that the 73.9% of the beautified faces are more attractive than the original pictures.

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Notes

  1. http://www.festivaldellacreativita.it

  2. http://venus.dii.unisi.it

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Via Roma, 56, 53100, Siena, Italy

    Stefano Melacci, Lorenzo Sarti, Marco Maggini & Marco Gori

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  1. Stefano Melacci
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  2. Lorenzo Sarti
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  3. Marco Maggini
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  4. Marco Gori
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Correspondence to Lorenzo Sarti.

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Melacci, S., Sarti, L., Maggini, M. et al. A template-based approach to automatic face enhancement. Pattern Anal Applic 13, 289–300 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-009-0155-0

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