No Arabic abstract
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 explore and analyze the latent style space of StyleGAN2, a state-of-the-art architecture for image generation, using models pretrained on several different datasets. We first show that StyleSpace, the space of channel-wise style parameters, is significantly more disentangled than the other intermediate latent spaces explored by previous works. Next, we describe a method for discovering a large collection of style channels, each of which is shown to control a distinct visual attribute in a highly localized and disentangled manner. Third, we propose a simple method for identifying style channels that control a specific attribute, using a pretrained classifier or a small number of example images. Manipulation of visual attributes via these StyleSpace controls is shown to be better disentangled than via those proposed in previous works. To show this, we make use of a newly proposed Attribute Dependency metric. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of StyleSpace controls to the manipulation of real images. Our findings pave the way to semantically meaningful and well-disentangled image manipulations via simple and intuitive interfaces.
In this paper, we propose the first sketching system for interactively personalized and photorealistic face caricaturing. Input an image of a human face, the users can create caricature photos by manipulating its facial feature curves. Our system firstly performs exaggeration on the recovered 3D face model according to the edited sketches, which is conducted by assigning the laplacian of each vertex a scaling factor. To construct the mapping between 2D sketches and a vertex-wise scaling field, a novel deep learning architecture is developed. With the obtained 3D caricature model, two images are generated, one obtained by applying 2D warping guided by the underlying 3D mesh deformation and the other obtained by re-rendering the deformed 3D textured model. These two images are then seamlessly integrated to produce our final output. Due to the severely stretching of meshes, the rendered texture is of blurry appearances. A deep learning approach is exploited to infer the missing details for enhancing these blurry regions. Moreover, a relighting operation is invented to further improve the photorealism of the result. Both quantitative and qualitative experiment results validated the efficiency of our sketching system and the superiority of our proposed techniques against existing methods.
This paper studies the problem of StyleGAN inversion, which plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained StyleGAN to be used for real facial image editing tasks. This problem has the high demand for quality and efficiency. Existing optimization-based methods can produce high quality results, but the optimization often takes a long time. On the contrary, forward-based methods are usually faster but the quality of their results is inferior. In this paper, we present a new feed-forward network for StyleGAN inversion, with significant improvement in terms of efficiency and quality. In our inversion network, we introduce: 1) a shallower backbone with multiple efficient heads across scales; 2) multi-layer identity loss and multi-layer face parsing loss to the loss function; and 3) multi-stage refinement. Combining these designs together forms a simple and efficient baseline method which exploits all benefits of optimization-based and forward-based methods. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method performs better than existing forward-based methods and comparably to state-of-the-art optimization-based methods, while maintaining the high efficiency as well as forward-based methods. Moreover, a number of real image editing applications demonstrate the efficacy of our method. Our project page is ~url{https://wty-ustc.github.io/inversion}.
StyleGAN is able to produce photorealistic images that are almost indistinguishable from real ones. The reverse problem of finding an embedding for a given image poses a challenge. Embeddings that reconstruct an image well are not always robust to editing operations. In this paper, we address the problem of finding an embedding that both reconstructs images and also supports image editing tasks. First, we introduce a new normalized space to analyze the diversity and the quality of the reconstructed latent codes. This space can help answer the question of where good latent codes are located in latent space. Second, we propose an improved embedding algorithm using a novel regularization method based on our analysis. Finally, we analyze the quality of different embedding algorithms. We compare our results with the current state-of-the-art methods and achieve a better trade-off between reconstruction quality and editing quality.
We introduce a highly robust GAN-based framework for digitizing a normalized 3D avatar of a person from a single unconstrained photo. While the input image can be of a smiling person or taken in extreme lighting conditions, our method can reliably produce a high-quality textured model of a persons face in neutral expression and skin textures under diffuse lighting condition. Cutting-edge 3D face reconstruction methods use non-linear morphable face models combined with GAN-based decoders to capture the likeness and details of a person but fail to produce neutral head models with unshaded albedo textures which is critical for creating relightable and animation-friendly avatars for integration in virtual environments. The key challenges for existing methods to work is the lack of training and ground truth data containing normalized 3D faces. We propose a two-stage approach to address this problem. First, we adopt a highly robust normalized 3D face generator by embedding a non-linear morphable face model into a StyleGAN2 network. This allows us to generate detailed but normalized facial assets. This inference is then followed by a perceptual refinement step that uses the generated assets as regularization to cope with the limited available training samples of normalized faces. We further introduce a Normalized Face Dataset, which consists of a combination photogrammetry scans, carefully selected photographs, and generated fake people with neutral expressions in diffuse lighting conditions. While our prepared dataset contains two orders of magnitude less subjects than cutting edge GAN-based 3D facial reconstruction methods, we show that it is possible to produce high-quality normalized face models for very challenging unconstrained input images, and demonstrate superior performance to the current state-of-the-art.