Okay, so I wanted to see if I could automatically tell if a caricature was, you know, bad. Like, objectively bad. Not just, “I don’t like it,” but something more…measurable. I’m no art critic, but I figured there’s gotta be some way to do this with computers, right?
My Little Experiment
First, I needed some pictures. I grabbed a bunch of caricatures online – some that looked pretty good, and some that were…well, let’s just say they were “interesting.” I made sure I had a good mix.
Then, I started playing around with some image processing libraries. I’ve messed with this stuff before, but mostly for simple things like resizing images or changing colors. This was a whole new level.
- I tried to detect faces. This was surprisingly easy! There are tools out there that can do this pretty well.
- Then, I attempted to identify key facial features – you know, eyes, nose, mouth, the whole shebang. This was trickier. Sometimes it worked great, sometimes…not so much.
- My big idea was to measure the proportions of the face. Like, how big is the nose compared to the eyes? How wide is the mouth? Caricatures exaggerate these features, so I figured I could use that.
I spent a few hours just tweaking things. I’d run the code, see what it spit out, and then adjust the numbers. It was a lot of trial and error. I felt like a mad scientist, but with less bubbling beakers and more staring at lines of code.
I quickly discovered the hard part about my plan. Getting exact proportions for faces is not that easy! At some point, I had to rule out some photos, because the program could not get a good read on it.
The “Aha!” Moment (Sort Of)
Eventually, I got something that kind of worked. I could feed it a caricature, and it would give me a bunch of numbers representing the ratios of different facial features. The bigger the numbers, the more exaggerated the features were.
I compared these numbers to my “good” and “bad” examples. I was hoping to see a clear pattern – like, “bad” caricatures always had a nose-to-eye ratio above a certain number. But…it wasn’t that simple.
Some “bad” caricatures had crazy proportions, but some didn’t! And some “good” ones had pretty extreme features too. It turns out, making a good caricature is more than just making things bigger or smaller.
What I Learned
So, did I succeed in creating an “evaluacion mala caricatura” machine? Not really. But I did learn a few things:
- Computers are good at measuring things, but they’re not so good at judging art.
- Making a good caricature is a real skill. It’s not just about following rules.
- I had a lot of fun messing around with image processing. Even if I didn’t quite reach my goal, I still learned something new.
Maybe I’ll revisit this project someday. Maybe I’ll try a different approach. Or maybe I’ll just stick to drawing stick figures. Who knows! This project may have been a bust, but that’s the life of experimenting.
