Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semantics

This paper presents an unpaired method for creating line drawings from photographs. Current methods often rely on high quality paired datasets to generate line drawings. However, these datasets often have limitations due to the subjects of the drawings belonging to a specific domain, or in the amount of data collected. Although recent work in unsupervised image-to-image translation has shown much progress, the latest methods still struggle to generate compelling line drawings. We observe that line drawings are encodings of scene information and seek to convey 3D shape and semantic meaning. We build these observations into a set of objectives and train an image translation to map photographs into line drawings. We introduce a geometry loss which predicts depth information from the image features of a line drawing, and a semantic loss which matches the CLIP features of a line drawing with its corresponding photograph. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unpaired image translation and line drawing generation methods on creating line drawings from arbitrary photographs. For code and demo visit our webpage carolineec.github.io/informative_drawings

Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture

Human speech is often accompanied by hand and arm gestures. Given audio speech input, we generate plausible gestures to go along with the sound. Specifically, we perform cross-modal translation from "in-the-wild'' monologue speech of a single speaker to their hand and arm motion. We train on unlabeled videos for which we only have noisy pseudo ground truth from an automatic pose detection system. Our proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods in a quantitative comparison. To support research toward obtaining a computational understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech, we release a large video dataset of person-specific gestures. The project website with video, code and data can be found at http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shiry/speech2gesture .

Everybody Dance Now

This paper presents a simple method for "do as I do" motion transfer: given a source video of a person dancing we can transfer that performance to a novel (amateur) target after only a few minutes of the target subject performing standard moves. We pose this problem as a per-frame image-to-image translation with spatio-temporal smoothing. Using pose detections as an intermediate representation between source and target, we learn a mapping from pose images to a target subject's appearance. We adapt this setup for temporally coherent video generation including realistic face synthesis. Our video demo can be found at https://youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris .