Alright, so check this out. Been messing around with some image stuff lately, trying to get this “khamzat no beard” thing working. Sounds simple, right? Famous last words, man.
First off, I grabbed a bunch of pics of Khamzat Chimaev. You know, the usual – fight shots, interviews, the works. Made sure I had a good mix of angles and lighting. That’s always key, learned that the hard way on previous projects.
Then, jumped into the software. Started with some basic face detection. Got a box around his face, no problem. Next up was isolating the beard area. This is where things got tricky. Tried a few different methods: color-based segmentation, edge detection, even some fancy AI-powered stuff. The color thing was a bust – too much variation in beard color depending on the lighting. Edge detection was better, but still picked up a lot of noise around the jawline.
Ended up using a combination of techniques. I started with a pre-trained facial landmark model to get the rough outline of the beard area. Then, I used some morphological operations (erosion and dilation, look it up if you’re curious) to clean up the mask. It was still kinda janky, but way better than before.
Okay, now came the fun part: actually removing the beard. My first thought was just to blur the area and call it a day. Nope. Looked terrible – like he’d smeared peanut butter all over his face. I tried some inpainting algorithms, which are supposed to fill in the missing pixels seamlessly. Better, but still kinda noticeable. You could tell something was off.
Finally, I hit on something that worked reasonably well. I sampled skin texture from other parts of his face – forehead, cheeks, whatever looked good – and used that to patch up the beard area. It was a manual process, tweaking the color and blending to get it to match. It wasn’t perfect, but it was way less obvious than the other methods.
After all that tweaking, I got a result that I was willing to share. Not perfect, but close enough. It’s wild how much a beard can change someone’s appearance. The “no beard” version looks almost unrecognizable.
- Gathered a ton of Khamzat Chimaev pics.
- Tried various beard-removal techniques (blurring, inpainting, etc.).
- Settled on texture-sampling and manual patching for the best results.
Honestly, the biggest takeaway from all this is that image manipulation is way harder than it looks. There’s a million little details that can throw things off. But hey, that’s why it’s fun, right?
