Hairstyle modelling based on a single image.

Hair is an important feature to form character appearance in both film and video game industry. Hair grooming and combing for virtual characters was traditionally an exclusive task for professional designers because of its requirements for both technical manipulation and artistic inspiration. However, this manual process is time-consuming and further limits the flexibility of customised hairstyle modelling. In addition, it is hard to manipulate virtual hairstyle due to intrinsic hair shape. The fast development of related industrial applications demand an intuitive tool for efficiently creating realistic hairstyle for non-professional users. Recently, image-based hair modelling has been investigated for generating realistic hairstyle. This thesis demonstrates a framework Struct2Hair that robustly captures a hairstyle from a single portrait input. Specifically, the 2D hair strands are traced from the input with the help of image processing enhancement first. Then the 2D hair sketch of a hairstyle on a coarse level is extracted from generated 2D hair strands by clustering. To solve the inherently ill-posed single-view reconstruction problem, a critical hair shape database has been built by analysing an existing hairstyle model database. The critical hair shapes is a group of hair strands which possess similar shape appearance and close space location. Once the prior shape knowledge is prepared, the hair shape descriptor (HSD) is introduced to encode the structure of the target hairstyle. The HSD is constructed by retrieving and matching corresponding critical hair shape centres in the database. The full-head hairstyle is reconstructed by uniformly diffusing the hair strands on the scalp surface under the guidance of extracted HSD. The produced results are evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art image based hair modelling methods. The findings of this thesis lead to some promising applications such as blending hairstyles to populate novel hair model, editing hairstyle (adding fringe hair, curling and cutting/extending hairstyle) and a case study of Bas-relief hair modelling on pre-processed hair images