Image Processing : Morphing
Morphing is an image processing technique used for the metamorphosis from one
image to another. The idea is to get a sequence of intermediate images which
when put together with the original images would represent the change from one
image to the other.
The simplest method of transforming one image into another is to
cross-dissolve between them. In this method, the color of each pixel is
interpolated over time from the first image value to the corresponding second
image value. This is not so effective in suggesting the actual metamorphosis.
For morphs between faces, the metamorphosis does not look good if the two
faces do not have the same shape approximately.
In this project, we implemented a morphing scheme which would combine
cross-dissolve with warping methods to give good morphs.
This is based on "Feature-Based Image Metamorphosis" by Thaddeus Beier
and Shawn Neely. The morph process consists of a warping stage before
cross-dissolving so that the two images have the same shape. The warp
is specified, in this case, by a mapping between lines in the first and
second images. In the following discussion, the first image will be called
the source image and the last image will be called the destination image.