Facial manipulation - remove / change hair style

Question

I have a client who would like an iphone app that allows users to take a portrait picture of themselves, then try on different hair styles.

I have been experimenting with the opencv framework and can quite easily get a bounding box around a persons face. But I imagine it will be difficult to automatically place a hair style in the right place, without it looking like a dodgy wig.

Plus there's the issue of the accuracy of the facial detection, which I don't think would be a huge issue if they are using their phone to take a clear, close-up picture of their faces.

They are looking for something similar to the "fat booth", "age booth" apps, but obviously that changes hair styles.

Does anyone have any advice/tips on how this could be done, and just how feasible a project it is?/

Cheers, imanc

Answer 1

You are talking about a research project on topics that have never even been tackled, by anyone, anywhere.

(Note that "facial recognition" will give you a blob with perhaps 100x worse accuracy than you need for something as astonishing as manipulating hair. Using "facial recognition" would barely be a passing interest of a research program like this .. you'd have to start researching stuff like "skin recognition" "hair recognition" "cross-racial hair-skin boundary detection evolutionary algorithm generation" and the like.)

What I suggest is a cheap, crappy solution that is a clever trick...

Try something like this ...

1. Look for a "dark area near the top" of the frame. 99 times out of 100 that will be "more or less the hair"

2. now apply funny effects to that area, thus,

3. color change!

4. squash/stretch!

5. "OhNoHe'sBald!" effect ... replace the hair blob with a patch of color in common skin tones

6. Sparkles! If it's a kids' app like cake doodle just add sparkle this and that everywhere.

7. Animated Sparkle effect! Like point 6, but make them animate.

I hope it helps!

Congratulations on in a sense posting the hardest question ever on stackoverflow! :)

As a more serious point, whenever someone ask you to do a True AI job, wherever possible just reply with a "cheap trick" heuristic solution. Unless you have a research-level budget for staff for a few years!