Patent ID: 6937755

Claim:
A method for simulating an appearance of products on an image of a consumer, comprising: compiling a database of a plurality of products, said database including appearance information for each said product; acquiring a base image of a consumer, said base image including a plurality of pixels; identifying a product application area in said base image, said product application area including a blending region, said product application area and said blending region thereof being defined by sets of pixels of said base image; receiving a product selection from said consumer; retrieving appearance information associated with said selected product from said database; modifying appearance information of base image pixels of said product application area according to said appearance information of said selected product, thereby generating a modified image, comprising: assigning hue and saturation appearance values of pixels of said product application area equal to hue and saturation appearance values of said selected product, respectively; and assigning intensity appearance values of pixels of said product application area according to intensity appearance values of a plurality of base image pixels within said product application area and according to intensity appearance values of a plurality of base image pixels outside said product application area, employing the following function, I out =A*I in +B, where: I out is the value of the intensity of a pixel of the modified image; I out can range between upper and lower limits of 255 and 0, respectively; I in is the value of the intensity of an associated pixel of the base image; I in can range between the upper and lower limits; A is the slope of the function and is computed according to a Gaussian distribution function, as follows, A =exp(−0.5*( I color −I mean ) 2 /I stdev 2 ), where: I color is the value of the intensity of the selected product appearance information; I mean is a mean value of the intensities of the pixels in the product application area; and I stdev is a standard deviation of the intensities of the pixels in the product application area; and B is a constant computed by equating the I in and I out values to I mean and I color , respectively; blending said modified image with said base image by assigning appearance information of pixels of said blending region according to appearance information of pixels of said modified image and according to appearance information of associated pixels of said base image, thereby generating a composite image; displaying the composite image; and providing means to display an alternative product within said product application area.