Artistic Illumination Transfer for Portraits

Abstract

Relighting a portrait in a single image is still a challenging problem, particularly when only a single artistic reference photograph or painting is provided. In this paper, we propose an artistic illumination transfer system for portraits based on a database of portrait images (photographs and paintings) associated with hand-drawn illumination templates (276) by artists. Users can select a reference portrait image in the database, and the corresponding illumination template is transferred to an input portrait using image warping. Users can also provide reference portrait images those are not in the database. Based on the Face Illumination Descriptor (FID), the system selects from the database the reference image with the closest illumination to that of the user-provided reference image and adjusts the corresponding illumination template to match the contrast of the user-provided reference image. Experiments on not only paintings but also photographs, paper-cuts and sketches demonstrate that convincing illumination transferred results can be rendered by our system.