No Arabic abstract
Face sketch synthesis has made great progress in the past few years. Recent methods based on deep neural networks are able to generate high quality sketches from face photos. However, due to the lack of training data (photo-sketch pairs), none of such deep learning based methods can be applied successfully to face photos in the wild. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised deep learning architecture which extends face sketch synthesis to handle face photos in the wild by exploiting additional face photos in training. Instead of supervising the network with ground truth sketches, we first perform patch matching in feature space between the input photo and photos in a small reference set of photo-sketch pairs. We then compose a pseudo sketch feature representation using the corresponding sketch feature patches to supervise our network. With the proposed approach, we can train our networks using a small reference set of photo-sketch pairs together with a large face photo dataset without ground truth sketches. Experiments show that our method achieve state-of-the-art performance both on public benchmarks and face photos in the wild. Codes are available at https://github.com/chaofengc/Face-Sketch-Wild.
Imagining a colored realistic image from an arbitrarily drawn sketch is one of the human capabilities that we eager machines to mimic. Unlike previous methods that either requires the sketch-image pairs or utilize low-quantity detected edges as sketches, we study the exemplar-based sketch-to-image (s2i) synthesis task in a self-supervised learning manner, eliminating the necessity of the paired sketch data. To this end, we first propose an unsupervised method to efficiently synthesize line-sketches for general RGB-only datasets. With the synthetic paired-data, we then present a self-supervised Auto-Encoder (AE) to decouple the content/style features from sketches and RGB-images, and synthesize images that are both content-faithful to the sketches and style-consistent to the RGB-images. While prior works employ either the cycle-consistence loss or dedicated attentional modules to enforce the content/style fidelity, we show AEs superior performance with pure self-supervisions. To further improve the synthesis quality in high resolution, we also leverage an adversarial network to refine the details of synthetic images. Extensive experiments on 1024*1024 resolution demonstrate a new state-of-art-art performance of the proposed model on CelebA-HQ and Wiki-Art datasets. Moreover, with the proposed sketch generator, the model shows a promising performance on style mixing and style transfer, which require synthesized images to be both style-consistent and semantically meaningful. Our code is available on https://github.com/odegeasslbc/Self-Supervised-Sketch-to-Image-Synthesis-PyTorch, and please visit https://create.playform.io/my-projects?mode=sketch for an online demo of our model.
In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on deep neural networks for face sketch synthesis from a photo. Imitating the process of how artists draw sketches, our framework synthesizes face sketches in a cascaded manner. A content image is first generated that outlines the shape of the face and the key facial features. Textures and shadings are then added to enrich the details of the sketch. We utilize a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) to create the content image, and propose a style transfer approach to introduce textures and shadings based on a newly proposed pyramid column feature. We demonstrate that our style transfer approach based on the pyramid column feature can not only preserve more sketch details than the common style transfer method, but also surpasses traditional patch based methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations suggest that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-arts methods, and can also generalize well to different test images. Codes are available at https://github.com/chaofengc/Face-Sketch
Existing face sketch synthesis (FSS) similarity measures are sensitive to slight image degradation (e.g., noise, blur). However, human perception of the similarity of two sketches will consider both structure and texture as essential factors and is not sensitive to slight (pixel-level) mismatches. Consequently, the use of existing similarity measures can lead to better algorithms receiving a lower score than worse algorithms. This unreliable evaluation has significantly hindered the development of the FSS field. To solve this problem, we propose a novel and robust style similarity measure called Scoot-measure (Structure CO-Occurrence Texture Measure), which simultaneously evaluates block-level spatial structure and co-occurrence texture statistics. In addition, we further propose 4 new meta-measures and create 2 new datasets to perform a comprehensive evaluation of several widely-used FSS measures on two large databases. Experimental results demonstrate that our measure not only provides a reliable evaluation but also achieves significantly improved performance. Specifically, the study indicated a higher degree (78.8%) of correlation between our measure and human judgment than the best prior measure (58.6%). Our code will be made available.
A fundamental challenge faced by existing Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) models is the data scarcity -- model performances are largely bottlenecked by the lack of sketch-photo pairs. Whilst the number of photos can be easily scaled, each corresponding sketch still needs to be individually produced. In this paper, we aim to mitigate such an upper-bound on sketch data, and study whether unlabelled photos alone (of which they are many) can be cultivated for performances gain. In particular, we introduce a novel semi-supervised framework for cross-modal retrieval that can additionally leverage large-scale unlabelled photos to account for data scarcity. At the centre of our semi-supervision design is a sequential photo-to-sketch generation model that aims to generate paired sketches for unlabelled photos. Importantly, we further introduce a discriminator guided mechanism to guide against unfaithful generation, together with a distillation loss based regularizer to provide tolerance against noisy training samples. Last but not least, we treat generation and retrieval as two conjugate problems, where a joint learning procedure is devised for each module to mutually benefit from each other. Extensive experiments show that our semi-supervised model yields significant performance boost over the state-of-the-art supervised alternatives, as well as existing methods that can exploit unlabelled photos for FG-SBIR.
On existing public benchmarks, face forgery detection techniques have achieved great success. However, when used in multi-person videos, which often contain many people active in the scene with only a small subset having been manipulated, their performance remains far from being satisfactory. To take face forgery detection to a new level, we construct a novel large-scale dataset, called FFIW-10K, which comprises 10,000 high-quality forgery videos, with an average of three human faces in each frame. The manipulation procedure is fully automatic, controlled by a domain-adversarial quality assessment network, making our dataset highly scalable with low human cost. In addition, we propose a novel algorithm to tackle the task of multi-person face forgery detection. Supervised by only video-level label, the algorithm explores multiple instance learning and learns to automatically attend to tampered faces. Our algorithm outperforms representative approaches for both forgery classification and localization on FFIW-10K, and also shows high generalization ability on existing benchmarks. We hope that our dataset and study will help the community to explore this new field in more depth.