No Arabic abstract
Previous methods have dealt with discrete manipulation of facial attributes such as smile, sad, angry, surprise etc, out of canonical expressions and they are not scalable, operating in single modality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that supports continuous edits and multi-modality portrait manipulation using adversarial learning. Specifically, we adapt cycle-consistency into the conditional setting by leveraging additional facial landmarks information. This has two effects: first cycle mapping induces bidirectional manipulation and identity preserving; second pairing samples from different modalities can thus be utilized. To ensure high-quality synthesis, we adopt texture-loss that enforces texture consistency and multi-level adversarial supervision that facilitates gradient flow. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show the effectiveness of our framework in performing flexible and multi-modality portrait manipulation with photo-realistic effects.
Casually-taken portrait photographs often suffer from unflattering lighting and shadowing because of suboptimal conditions in the environment. Aesthetic qualities such as the position and softness of shadows and the lighting ratio between the bright and dark parts of the face are frequently determined by the constraints of the environment rather than by the photographer. Professionals address this issue by adding light shaping tools such as scrims, bounce cards, and flashes. In this paper, we present a computational approach that gives casual photographers some of this control, thereby allowing poorly-lit portraits to be relit post-capture in a realistic and easily-controllable way. Our approach relies on a pair of neural networks---one to remove foreign shadows cast by external objects, and another to soften facial shadows cast by the features of the subject and to add a synthetic fill light to improve the lighting ratio. To train our first network we construct a dataset of real-world portraits wherein synthetic foreign shadows are rendered onto the face, and we show that our network learns to remove those unwanted shadows. To train our second network we use a dataset of Light Stage scans of human subjects to construct input/output pairs of input images harshly lit by a small light source, and variably softened and fill-lit output images of each face. We propose a way to explicitly encode facial symmetry and show that our dataset and training procedure enable the model to generalize to images taken in the wild. Together, these networks enable the realistic and aesthetically pleasing enhancement of shadows and lights in real-world portrait images
Digital face manipulation has become a popular and fascinating way to touch images with the prevalence of smartphones and social networks. With a wide variety of user preferences, facial expressions, and accessories, a general and flexible model is necessary to accommodate different types of facial editing. In this paper, we propose a model to achieve this goal based on an end-to-end convolutional neural network that supports fast inference, edit-effect control, and quick partial-model update. In addition, this model learns from unpaired image sets with different attributes. Experimental results show that our framework can handle a wide range of expressions, accessories, and makeup effects. It produces high-resolution and high-quality results in fast speed.
Compared to the general semantic segmentation problem, portrait segmentation has higher precision requirement on boundary area. However, this problem has not been well studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a boundary-sensitive deep neural network (BSN) for portrait segmentation. BSN introduces three novel techniques. First, an individual boundary-sensitive kernel is proposed by dilating the contour line and assigning the boundary pixels with multi-class labels. Second, a global boundary-sensitive kernel is employed as a position sensitive prior to further constrain the overall shape of the segmentation map. Third, we train a boundary-sensitive attribute classifier jointly with the segmentation network to reinforce the network with semantic boundary shape information. We have evaluated BSN on the current largest public portrait segmentation dataset, i.e, the PFCN dataset, as well as the portrait images collected from other three popular image segmentation datasets: COCO, COCO-Stuff, and PASCAL VOC. Our method achieves the superior quantitative and qualitative performance over state-of-the-arts on all the datasets, especially on the boundary area.
Editing of portrait images is a very popular and important research topic with a large variety of applications. For ease of use, control should be provided via a semantically meaningful parameterization that is akin to computer animation controls. The vast majority of existing techniques do not provide such intuitive and fine-grained control, or only enable coarse editing of a single isolated control parameter. Very recently, high-quality semantically controlled editing has been demonstrated, however only on synthetically created StyleGAN images. We present the first approach for embedding real portrait images in the latent space of StyleGAN, which allows for intuitive editing of the head pose, facial expression, and scene illumination in the image. Semantic editing in parameter space is achieved based on StyleRig, a pretrained neural network that maps the control space of a 3D morphable face model to the latent space of the GAN. We design a novel hierarchical non-linear optimization problem to obtain the embedding. An identity preservation energy term allows spatially coherent edits while maintaining facial integrity. Our approach runs at interactive frame rates and thus allows the user to explore the space of possible edits. We evaluate our approach on a wide set of portrait photos, compare it to the current state of the art, and validate the effectiveness of its components in an ablation study.
Style analysis of artwork in computer vision predominantly focuses on achieving results in target image generation through optimizing understanding of low level style characteristics such as brush strokes. However, fundamentally different techniques are required to computationally understand and control qualities of art which incorporate higher level style characteristics. We study style representations learned by neural network architectures incorporating these higher level characteristics. We find variation in learned style features from incorporating triplets annotated by art historians as supervision for style similarity. Networks leveraging statistical priors or pretrained on photo collections such as ImageNet can also derive useful visual representations of artwork. We align the impact of these expert human knowledge, statistical, and photo realism priors on style representations with art historical research and use these representations to perform zero-shot classification of artists. To facilitate this work, we also present the first large-scale dataset of portraits prepared for computational analysis.