High-Quality Face Caricature via Style Translation

Abstract

Caricature is an exaggerated form of artistic portraiture that accentuates unique yet subtle characteristics of human faces. Recently, advancements in deep end-to-end techniques have yielded encouraging outcomes in capturing both style and elevated exaggerations in creating face caricatures. Most of these approaches tend to produce cartoon-like results that could be more practical for real-world applications. In this study, we proposed a high-quality, unpaired face caricature method that is appropriate for use in the real world and uses computer vision techniques and GAN models. We attain the exaggeration of facial features and the stylization of appearance through a two-step process: Face caricature generation and face caricature projection. The face caricature generation step creates new caricature face datasets from real images and trains a generative model using the real and newly created caricature datasets. The Face caricature projection employs an encoder trained with real and caricature faces with the pre-trained generator to project real and caricature faces. Using the encoder and generator’s latent space, we perform an incremental facial exaggeration from the real image to the caricature faces. Our projection preserves the facial identity, attributes, and expressions from the input image. Also, it accounts for facial occlusions, such as reading glasses or sunglasses, to enhance the robustness of our model. Furthermore, we comprehensively compared our approach with various state-of-the-art face caricature methods, highlighting our process’s distinctiveness and exceptional realism.

Keywords

• Face caricature
• facial exaggeration
• image translation
• GAN