2-D Shape Blending based on Visual Feature Decomposition

2-D polygon shape blending has been widely used in 2-D character animation, pattern matching, and geometric modeling. Previous algorithms mostly tend to use the polygon’s geometric elements such as edge, angle, area and skeleton, to associate the regions on the two shapes which look alike. However they ignore the visual features of two polygonal shapes. This paper presents a new 2-D polygonal shape blending method based on the correspondence of visual features. By decomposing the two shapes into sub-shape pairs which have similar visual features compatibly, the sub-shape in the source polygon can be smoothly transformed into the corresponding sub-shape in the destination polygon. Since the feature-decomposition vertices are introduced and our blending algorithm is so simple , the user can edit the visual correspondence of features flexibly and intuitively in real time. Experimental results show that the source shape can be transformed into the destination shape as prescribed by the user whilst keeping feature correspondence.