WHATSISFACE: Human facial composition by computer graphics

Sketching a human face is a task which involves spatial decisions and a knowledge of the aspects of the face that are important in recognition. These are talents which non-artists lack. This paper describes WHATSISFACE, a system with which a non-artist can create, on a graphic display, any male Caucasian facial image resembling the face on a photograph in front of him. The computer system contains pre-stored facial features, an average face used as a starting point, and a heuristic strategy which guides the user through a carefully constructed sequence of questions, choices, and feature manipulations. The user makes all of the visual decisions and can change the individual features or hierarchically organized sets of features using analog input devices. Several specialized graphics algorithms were developed for this work and are described