No Arabic abstract
Caricature is an artistic drawing created to abstract or exaggerate facial features of a person. Rendering visually pleasing caricatures is a difficult task that requires professional skills, and thus it is of great interest to design a method to automatically generate such drawings. To deal with large shape changes, we propose an algorithm based on a semantic shape transform to produce diverse and plausible shape exaggerations. Specifically, we predict pixel-wise semantic correspondences and perform image warping on the input photo to achieve dense shape transformation. We show that the proposed framework is able to render visually pleasing shape exaggerations while maintaining their facial structures. In addition, our model allows users to manipulate the shape via the semantic map. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large photograph-caricature benchmark dataset with comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods.
Many applications in 3D shape design and augmentation require the ability to make specific edits to an objects semantic parameters (e.g., the pose of a persons arm or the length of an airplanes wing) while preserving as much existing details as possible. We propose to learn a deep network that infers the semantic parameters of an input shape and then allows the user to manipulate those parameters. The network is trained jointly on shapes from an auxiliary synthetic template and unlabeled realistic models, ensuring robustness to shape variability while relieving the need to label realistic exemplars. At testing time, edits within the parameter space drive deformations to be applied to the original shape, which provides semantically-meaningful manipulation while preserving the details. This is in contrast to prior methods that either use autoencoders with a limited latent-space dimensionality, failing to preserve arbitrary detail, or drive deformations with purely-geometric controls, such as cages, losing the ability to update local part regions. Experiments with datasets of chairs, airplanes, and human bodies demonstrate that our method produces more natural edits than prior work.
We present a caricature generation framework based on shape and style manipulation using StyleGAN. Our framework, dubbed StyleCariGAN, automatically creates a realistic and detailed caricature from an input photo with optional controls on shape exaggeration degree and color stylization type. The key component of our method is shape exaggeration blocks that are used for modulating coarse layer feature maps of StyleGAN to produce desirable caricature shape exaggerations. We first build a layer-mixed StyleGAN for photo-to-caricature style conversion by swapping fine layers of the StyleGAN for photos to the corresponding layers of the StyleGAN trained to generate caricatures. Given an input photo, the layer-mixed model produces detailed color stylization for a caricature but without shape exaggerations. We then append shape exaggeration blocks to the coarse layers of the layer-mixed model and train the blocks to create shape exaggerations while preserving the characteristic appearances of the input. Experimental results show that our StyleCariGAN generates realistic and detailed caricatures compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate StyleCariGAN also supports other StyleGAN-based image manipulations, such as facial expression control.
We propose a new method for semantic instance segmentation, by first computing how likely two pixels are to belong to the same object, and then by grouping similar pixels together. Our similarity metric is based on a deep, fully convolutional embedding model. Our grouping method is based on selecting all points that are sufficiently similar to a set of seed points, chosen from a deep, fully convolutional scoring model. We show competitive results on the Pascal VOC instance segmentation benchmark.
Caricature generation is an interesting yet challenging task. The primary goal is to generate plausible caricatures with reasonable exaggerations given face images. Conventional caricature generation approaches mainly use low-level geometric transformations such as image warping to generate exaggerated images, which lack richness and diversity in terms of content and style. The recent progress in generative adversarial networks (GANs) makes it possible to learn an image-to-image transformation from data, so that richer contents and styles can be generated. However, directly applying the GAN-based models to this task leads to unsatisfactory results because there is a large variance in the caricature distribution. Moreover, some models require strictly paired training data which largely limits their usage scenarios. In this paper, we propose CariGAN overcome these problems. Instead of training on paired data, CariGAN learns transformations only from weakly paired images. Specifically, to enforce reasonable exaggeration and facial deformation, facial landmarks are adopted as an additional condition to constrain the generated image. Furthermore, an attention mechanism is introduced to encourage our model to focus on the key facial parts so that more vivid details in these regions can be generated. Finally, a Diversity Loss is proposed to encourage the model to produce diverse results to help alleviate the `mode collapse problem of the conventional GAN-based models. Extensive experiments on a new large-scale `WebCaricature dataset show that the proposed CariGAN can generate more plausible caricatures with larger diversity compared with the state-of-the-art models.
Detecting semantic parts of an object is a challenging task in computer vision, particularly because it is hard to construct large annotated datasets due to the difficulty of annotating semantic parts. In this paper we present an approach which learns from a small training dataset of annotated semantic parts, where the object is seen from a limited range of viewpoints, but generalizes to detect semantic parts from a much larger range of viewpoints. Our approach is based on a matching algorithm for finding accurate spatial correspondence between two images, which enables semantic parts annotated on one image to be transplanted to another. In particular, this enables images in the training dataset to be matched to a virtual 3D model of the object (for simplicity, we assume that the object viewpoint can be estimated by standard techniques). Then a clustering algorithm is used to annotate the semantic parts of the 3D virtual model. This virtual 3D model can be used to synthesize annotated images from a large range of viewpoint. These can be matched to images in the test set, using the same matching algorithm, to detect semantic parts in novel viewpoints of the object. Our algorithm is very simple, intuitive, and contains very few parameters. We evaluate our approach in the car subclass of the VehicleSemanticPart dataset. We show it outperforms standard deep network approaches and, in particular, performs much better on novel viewpoints. For facilitating the future research, code is available: https://github.com/ytongbai/SemanticPartDetection