Abstract:
It's always fascinating to see how an artist draws a picture of someone's face. Sketches are perhaps the simplest form of drawings because they consist of only lines. In this talk, I will present an example-based facial sketch system. Our system automatically generates a sketch from an input face image, by learning from example sketches drawn with a particular style by an artist. There are two key elements in our system: a non-parametric sampling method and a flexible sketch model. Given an input image pixel and its neighborhood, the conditional distribution of a sketch point is computed by querying the examples and finding all similar neighborhoods. An "expected sketch image" is then drawn from the distribution to reflect the drawing style. Finally, facial sketches are obtained by incorporating the sketch model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques.

Biography:
Harry Shum received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. He worked as a researcher for three years in the vision technology group at Microsoft Research Redmond. In 1999, he moved to Microsoft Research China where he is currently a senior researcher and the assistant managing director. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, user interface, pattern recognition, statistical learning and robotics. Prof. Shum is also an adjunct faculty member of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.