Simple image morphing - α-blending of two images using cross-dissolving

The following code block shows how to start from one face image (image₁ being the face of Messi) and end up with another image (image₂ being the face of Ronaldo) by using a linear combination of the two image numpy ndarrays given with the following equation:

 

We do this by iteratively increasing α from 0 to 1:

im1 = mpimg.imread("../images/messi.jpg") / 255 # scale RGB values in [0,1]
im2 = mpimg.imread("../images/ronaldo.jpg") / 255
i = 1
plt.figure(figsize=(18,15))
for alpha in np.linspace(0,1,20):
 plt.subplot(4,5,i)
 plt.imshow((1-alpha)*im1 + alpha*im2)
 plt.axis('off')
 i += 1
plt.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.05, hspace=0.05)
plt.show()

The next figure shows the sequence of the α-blended images created using the previous code by cross-dissolving Messi's face image into Ronaldo's. As can be seen from the sequence of intermediate images in the figure, the face morphing with simple blending is not very smooth. In upcoming chapters, we shall see more advanced techniques for image morphing: