Warping photos could help text-based communications become more expressive.
By Duncan Graham-Rowe
Computer scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a way to make e-mails, instant messaging, and texts just a bit more personalized. Their software will allow people to use images of their own faces instead of the more traditional emoticons to communicate their mood. By automatically warping their facial features, people can use a photo to depict any one of a range of different animated emotional expressions, such as happy, sad, angry, or surprised.
All that is needed is a single photo of the person, preferably with a neutral expression, says Xin Li, who developed the system, called Face Alive Icons. “The user can upload the image from their camera phone,” he says. Then, by keying in familiar text symbols, such as “:)” for a smile, the user automatically contorts the face to reflect his or her desired expression.
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For more information, this research work has been published online on March 12, 2007, by the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing under the name “Face Alive Icons.” Unfortunately, the Elsevier group doesn’t even provide an abstract — you need to pay $30 to read the article. But here is a link to a previous paper about these Face Alive Icons (PDF format, 8 pages, 386 KB), which was presented at the Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’05), Taipei, Taiwan, July 14-16, 2005. The above illustrations have been extracted from this paper.
