Computer-Assisted Facial Sketching
Mark L. Gillenson, B. Chandrasekaran, Charles A. Csuri, Robert A. Schwartz · Leonardo · 1976
What is it about a sketch of a face, merely a few lines drawn on a piece of paper, that makes a viewer recognize them as the face of a specific person? Clearly, an artist makes a remarkable series of decisions about which aspects of a face are information-bearing for the purpose of recognition and transforms these decisions into a collection of lines. But an untrained or untalented person who desires to sketch a face is generally at a loss to know what to draw or how to draw it. Can today's state of technology provide him with a sketching tool that will augment his artistic ability in the sense of aiding him in how to draw a face ? Using state-of-the-art techniques in the fields of computer graphics and artificial intelligence and some of the latest hardware in the computer graphics field, we have developed such a tool. The WHATSISFACE SYSTEM, described below, is a man-machine system with which an artistically untrained person can draw on a graphic display any male, Caucasian facial image from a photograph in front of him. The computer system contains pre-stored facial features, an average face used as a starting point and a heuristic strategy that guides the user in the generation of a 2dimensional image. The user makes the visual decisions and makes changes in the displayed image by adjusting analog input devices. The human interaction is restricted to providing the kinds of information that non-artists, unfamiliar with computers, can be expected to provide. They are not expected to draw arbitrary curves corresponding to 'free-hand' drawing. The burden of developing the image is, as much as possible, placed on the computer and its heuristic strategy, while most of the human intervention is restricted to