PicToon: A Personalized Image-based Cartoon System

In this paper, we present PicToon, a cartoon system which can generate a personalized cartoon face from an input Picture. PicToon is easy to use and requires little user interaction. Our system consists of three major components: an image-based Cartoon Generator, an interactive Cartoon Editor for exaggeration, and a speech-driven Cartoon Animator. First, to capture an artistic style, the cartoon generation is decoupled into two processes: sketch generation and stroke rendering. An example-based approach is taken to automatically generate sketch lines which depict the facial structure. An inhomogeneous non-parametric sampling plus a flexible facial template is employed to extract the vector-based facial sketch. Various styles of strokes can then be applied. Second, with the pre-designed templates in Cartoon Editor, the user can easily make the cartoon exaggerated or more expressive. Third, a real-time lip-syncing algorithm is also developed that recovers a statistical audio-visual mapping between the character's voice and the corresponding lip configuration. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.