Part-to-part morphing for planar curves

Abstract

This paper presents a shape-morphing technique that interpolates a pair of 2D polygons or curves. Firstly, a user-guided feature point correspondence is introduced to associate similar parts between the source and target shapes, which allows user to control the correspondence results effectively and flexibly. Secondly, to fully capture the global and local motions of the shapes, we define a simple structure called a part figure to represent these movements in terms of the shape parts. The part figure representation is general and applicable to various part associations between the shapes. By interpolating the part figures of the shapes, the smooth transition of the global and local movements from the source to the target shape is generated, which results in in-between shape parts with least distortion. Then, the coherent intermediate shapes of the morphing sequence are formed from these intermediate shape parts. Experimental results show that the method can transform the source shape into the target shape as expected and generate natural and visually pleasing effects.