If you want to have a little fun with a picture of someone, then you could open it in a graphics editor, draw on glasses, add a clipart wig, maybe a hat. But if that sounds like too much work, you could just use Funny Mask to do much the same thing, at a click.

The program is small, portable and easy to use. Just launch it, and click “Draw On Screen”. Funny Mask uses OpenCV (the Open Source Computer Vision Library) to look for faces, and adds one of twelve silly customisations to anything it finds (wigs, glasses, hats, a moustache, and more).

By default the program chooses a mask at random. If you have a preference, click the arrow to the right of “Draw On Screen” and select that option from the list.

Funny Mask detects faces and adds clipart-style extras with a click

When you’re happy, click Capture to save the results as FunnyMask.png in the Funny Mask folder. (Unfortunately it always uses this file name, so clicking Capture again will overwrite the previous image.)

The program didn’t always work for us. It had problems recognising faces which were cropped too tightly, for instance. And if a face is tilted then the mask won’t always be in the right place.

Funny Mask got it right enough times to be worth trying, though. It’s fun and easy to use, great as a way for kids to mess around on the PC. And there’s a bonus extra for the more experienced: the bundled 12 masks are just PNGs with a transparent background, so it’s easy to customise them or create more.