High-Quality Face Caricature via Style Translation

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 pretrained generator to project real and caricature faces. We perform an incremental facial exaggeration from the real image to the caricature faces using the encoder and generator's latent space. 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 conducted a comprehensive comparison of our approach with various state-of-the-art face caricature methods, highlighting our process's distinctiveness and exceptional realism.

Semantic Scene Graph Generation Based on an Edge Dual Scene Graph and Message Passing Neural Network

Along with generative AI, interest in scene graph generation (SGG), which comprehensively captures the relationships and interactions between objects in an image and creates a structured graph-based representation, has significantly increased in recent years. However, relying on object-centric and dichotomous relationships, existing SGG methods have a limited ability to accurately predict detailed relationships. To solve these problems, a new approach to the modeling multiobject relationships, called edge dual scene graph generation (EdgeSGG), is proposed herein. EdgeSGG is based on a edge dual scene graph and Dual Message Passing Neural Network (DualMPNN), which can capture rich contextual interactions between unconstrained objects. To facilitate the learning of edge dual scene graphs with a symmetric graph structure, the proposed DualMPNN learns both object- and relation-centric features for more accurately predicting relation-aware contexts and allows fine-grained relational updates between objects. A comparative experiment with state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods was conducted using two public datasets for SGG operations and six metrics for three subtasks. Compared with SoTA approaches, the proposed model exhibited substantial performance improvements across all SGG subtasks. Furthermore, experiment on long-tail distributions revealed that incorporating the relationships between objects effectively mitigates existing long-tail problems.