Snapchat has been upping the game every now and then with its innovations in the messaging industry. Last year, it bought Bitstrips, a company that allowed users to turn themselves into Emojis.
Recently, USPTO published an interesting patent assigned to Snapchat. It discloses an automated process to create a user facial avatar. Of course, some companies provide a personalized Avatar but what sets Snapchat apart from others is its novel method to use facial recognition/facial landmarks that automatically create user avatars.
In one of its embodiments, the patent discloses that a user can capture an image of the face using the smartphone’s camera and command the application to generate an avatar. The application then detects the portion of the user’s face and identifies a set of facial landmarks within that portion. The identified facial landmark values are further used to represent a facial avatar.
After generating an avatar, this application also allows the user to save the avatar, customize it further, generate another avatar, and generate additional graphics using the avatar. These additional graphics are in the form of emojis or stickers, which can quickly be sent to others as messages.
The avatar generation system can create a stylized avatar by quickly realizing face features such as face shape, skin color, eye color, hair color, hair texture, jaw-line shape, Nose Bridge, lip color, etc.