Patent ID: 8823834

Claim:
An image processing device comprising: circuitry configured to extract a face or head portion from an input image, the face or head portion being a region estimated to be a face or head image, crop a region immediately below the face or head portion of the input image, generate a color histogram of the region cropped, identify a clothing region based on the color histogram, the clothing region being a region estimated to be a clothing image, extract the clothing region, generate a mask encompassing the clothing image in the clothing region, perform a mask modifying process, responsive to generation of the mask, to enlarge, reduce or remove small regions from the mask, and change clothing in the mask after the mask modifying process by merging another image with the clothing image in the mask, wherein to generate the mask the circuitry is further configured to generate a graph of pixels in the clothing region using a predetermined energy function, use a predetermined cost function to determine a cost for each pixel relative to adjacent pixels, a cost of each pixel relative to a clothing node and a cost of each pixel relative to a background node, use a predetermined algorithm to group the pixels in the clothing region into one of a group of pixels corresponding to the clothing image or a group of pixels corresponding to a background image based on minimization of the sum of costs from the clothing node and the background node, and generate the mask to encompass the group of pixels corresponding to the clothing image.