Face Detection and Image combination

Question

Today I encountered interesting issue.

That's what I have: 2 images with humanoids on them (like human and orc image)

That's what I have to do: combine them the way human get's "an orc make-up", his skin becomes green and little more fat, etc...

How can I do it on the server, counting that I have a Ruby on Rails and PHP programmers? Is there an engine to do similar staff? I have heard of openCV and other tools to detect face, but what about face combination? You know, there are some websites where they combine 2 celebrities into one

I need some sources and examples. I know there are some sites like this . I wonder if there is some free code. In general this demo suits me very well, eventhough the sources are not free...

Answer 1

Good faces montage is not a trivial task and I don't know good open-sourced tools for that. But OpenCV has most of basic blocks needed to combine faces. This is a demo site which uses OpenCV under the hood. You can find more info on the blog of its authors.

Answer 2

You could have a look at so called image morphing (or the Beier-Neely Field Warping Algorithm) as I suspect that your optimal combination will be an intermediate shaped blend between the two face images, i.e a blend in both image shape and pixel value. Alternatively you could blend them directly using poisson image blending.

For both you will find plenty of tutorials and code online.