Face morphing is a new technology that provides the smooth modification or alteration of one face to another. However, this technique is commonly used across different industries, for example, entertainment, media, and other digital platforms or applications. However, face morphing is a powerful tool that provides multiple applications starting from producing remarkable visual effects in movies. Furthermore, you can see the results of face transitions in different movies and social media content. With the evolution of the latest algorithms and user-friendly software, this process has become more accessible and easy. The process of the morphing face is quite simple and we’ll discuss it in this article in step-by-step detail. It usually starts from retaining the initial images to the final alternated results. Let’s discuss eight important steps in detail.
1. Retaining High-Quality Images
This is the most important and initial step that starts with retaining high-quality face images that you want to transform or morph. However, there are some instructions that you need to follow, such as:
- Clear images
- Consistent angles
- Perfect lighting conditions
- Right facial expressions
All these factors are reliable for the seamless transition. Even high-resolution pictures are good to provide the best results which is good for the morphing process.
2. Recognizing Key Facial Features
After getting the image or picture, your next step will be to recognize the facial features of both faces. Furthermore, this process also includes in-point markings on important areas of the face. For instance, eyes, nose, mouth, and jawlines are the most important factors where marked points can be made. All these key points or landmarks are the reference points when it comes to the morphing algorithms.
3. Aligning the Faces
Now, in the third step, recognizing the facial features will be the major part of aligning the faces. This step includes scaling rotating, and image translations to keep the key points of both faces aligned as close as possible. Alignment is the most important factor in the online face morphing to transit the looks naturally and smoothly. Here are some tools for instance Procrustes analysis can easily perform face alignment by reducing the distance between combining marking points on both faces. l
4. Creating a Delaunay Triangulation
After aligning the face, your next step will create to a Delaunay triangulations for both face marking points. This entire process involves the triangle meshes depending on the landmarks. The Delaunay Triangulations will confirm that there’s no point in the circumcircle of the triangle. This confirmation helps in managing the face structure during the morphing process. In simple words, triangles perform as the major morphing units of one face to another.
5. Calculating Intermediate Points
If you want to get a seamless transformation between two faces, you can calculate the facial landmarks that represent the intermediate points. This process includes the linear approximation between two points from the source and target faces. By identifying these intermediate points, you can easily produce the number of series that will slowly merge from one face to another. The total number of intermediate frames will be set on the seamlessness of the morphing face.
6. Morphing the Facial Features
When you estimate the intermediate points, morphing the facial feature will be your next step. This method occurs based on transforming the triangles from the source face and the target face. However, each triangle is distorted by using the relative transformation that safeguards the related distance and angles in the triangles. The smooth blending of facial features from one to another will be the result.
7. Blending the Textures
After morphing the facial features, this is the second last step in the face morphing to mix the two images’ textures. However, this process includes the combination of the source pixel value and target images depending on the intermediate points. There are some mixture or blending methods, such as
- Cross-dissolve
- Feathering
These two techniques are usable to get the natural look of face morphing online. The aim is to confirm the skin tones, light conditions, and other smooth blending between two faces.
8. Providing the Final Morph
Now, this is the final step in the face morphing to provide the transition sequence. This final step includes producing the intermediate frames and the liveliness to reveal the transition of two faces—the source and target face. You can save the final animation result in the form of videos or GIFs, depending on your desired format.
