Scary Face off AR Video Chats

Arturo Castro shows a great video to the internet crowd, that amazes already thousands of people: he swaps his face that is held into his webcam in real-time for prominent faces. This face recognition algorithms plus replacement are of course well understood especially in the movie productions, but once again we can see how far free toolkits and standard hardware bring us today regarding real-time applications!

We can imagine lots of applications like avatar control (combined with altered-voice chat) or augmented video conferences to disguise yourself. This face substitution is not yet perfect, especially looking at the edges of the mapped skin without elaborate blending, but you get the idea and it should be sufficient for a big weekend “WOW” when seeing Michael Jackson chatting to you. ;-) There is more on real-time facial animation and to show another short video, I quote this one here, since it easily shows the underlying mesh and mapping process.

The demo uses openFrameworks, Jason Saragih’s c++ library for face tracking combined with Kyle McDonalds ofxFaceTracker, color interpolation algorithms from Kevin Atkinson to give full credits here. :-) Enjoy!

Faces from arturo castro on Vimeo.

… and if you were a little bit scared by this and on its possible future usage and scam potential, you can relax by having a cool drink with some augmented information and dancing girls. I guess the apps gives a bit of information about the product… or… not. :-)