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Adobe's FaceStyle Tool Takes No Prisoners
7 August 2017
Adobe has released -- well, more like foisted upon the world -- a FaceStyle Web app to illustrate what it calls "example-based synthesis of stylized facial animations."
Stylin'. Original (l) synthesized with four different face styles.
Don't expect to be flattered. The face styles available on the app are cruel hoaxes perpetrated by artless cartoonists under the influence of mind-altering stock options.
They were apparently trying to provide several artistic portrait styles but the only one that successfully exited the lab appears to be a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln.
We'll let them explain it:
We introduce a novel approach to example-based stylization of portrait videos that preserves both the subject's identity and the visual richness of the input style exemplar. Unlike the current state-of-the-art based on neural style transfer [Selim et al. 2016], our method performs non-parametric texture synthesis that retains more of the local textural details of the artistic exemplar and does not suffer from image warping artifacts caused by aligning the style exemplar with the target face. Our method allows the creation of videos with less than full temporal coherence [Ruder et al. 2016]. By introducing a controllable amount of temporal dynamics, it more closely approximates the appearance of real hand-painted animation in which every frame was created independently. We demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed solution on a variety of style exemplars and target videos.
If that wasn't clear enough, here's the video explanation:
We gave it a try, as you can see above. But we prefer our mug the way it was originally conceived. Without style, perhaps, but recognizable. Don't let our results discourage you, however. You no doubt will enjoy a far better start than we did.
Patent pending, indeed.