Bas-relief generation from face photograph based on facial feature enhancement

This paper describes a novel method for generating a bas-relief surface from the photographic image of a human face. One of the simplest methods is to take each pixel brightness as a depth value and use it to elevate the resulting surface. Although this approach can generate a bas-relief surface with realistic textures, it has the disadvantage of generating erroneous 3D depth. This problem is especially serious in the areas of facial features, such as hair, eyes, eyebrows, nose, and lips, because they are often composed of dark pixel values, and hence make the corresponding area sunken on the resulting surface. Our main contribution is to resolve this problem by detecting the facial features and making them protrude by adjusting the brightness values of the areas. The experimental results show that our method generates realistic and natural looking bas-relief surfaces that represent more accurate 3D depth, especially in the areas of facial features.