Image-based Height Enhancement

I came across an interesting app (Spring) last week that uses user-specified landmark positions to reshape the body proportions. Their results are quite fascinating. 

There are a few works on parametric modeling of human shapes that achieve awesome results, e.g.,

- Shizhe Zhou Hongbo Fu, Ligang Liu, Daniel Cohen-Or, and Xiaoguang Han, Parametric reshaping of human bodies in images, SIGGRAPH 2010 

- Arjun Jain Thorsten Thormählen Hans-Peter Seidel Christian Theobalt, MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos, SIGGRAPH Asia 2010

However, due to the use of continuous meshes for warping, artifacts are often obvious in the background if you need more dramatic results. 

To avoid such artifacts and limit the reshape to enhance the height, I implemented a simple variant for (semi-) automatic 1D body reshaping. The proportion could either be automatically determined or adjusted by the user through an 1D slider bar. Such automated approach allows us to process many images quickly. Here are some samples results downloaded from the Google image search. 

(Somehow I couldn't locate the sources from google image search. If you don't want your pictures to be shown here, please let me know and I will take it down immediately. Or, I could add them below the pictures.)

The original image is on the left. The reshaped version is on the right.

Source: Link

Source: Link

Source: Link

Source: Link

Btw, it also works for dogs! XD