Shapes2Toon: Generating Cartoon Characters from Simple Geometric Shapes

Cartoons are an important part of our entertainment culture. Though drawing a cartoon is not for everyone, creating it using an arrangement of basic geometric primitives that approximates that character is a fairly frequent technique in art. The key motivation behind this technique is that human bodies - as well as cartoon figures - can be split down into various basic geometric primitives. Numerous tutorials are available that demonstrate how to draw figures using an appropriate arrangement of fundamental shapes, thus assisting us in creating cartoon characters. This technique is very beneficial for children in terms of teaching them how to draw cartoons. In this paper, we develop a tool - shape2toon - that aims to automate this approach by utilizing a generative adversarial network which combines geometric primitives (i.e. circles) and generate a cartoon figure (i.e. Mickey Mouse) depending on the given approximation. For this purpose, we created a dataset of geometrically represented cartoon characters. We apply an image-to-image translation technique on our dataset and report the results in this paper. The experimental results show that our system can generate cartoon characters from input layout of geometric shapes. In addition, we demonstrate a web-based tool as a practical implication of our work.

Book Cover Synthesis from the Summary

The cover is the face of a book and is a point of attraction for the readers. Designing book covers is an essential task in the publishing industry. One of the main challenges in creating a book cover is representing the theme of the book's content in a single image. In this research, we explore ways to produce a book cover using artificial intelligence based on the fact that there exists a relationship between the summary of the book and its cover. Our key motivation is the application of text-to-image synthesis methods to generate images from given text or captions. We explore several existing text-to-image conversion techniques for this purpose and propose an approach to exploit these frameworks for producing book covers from provided summaries. We construct a dataset of English books that contains a large number of samples of summaries of existing books and their cover images. In this paper, we describe our approach to collecting, organizing, and pre-processing the dataset to use it for training models. We apply different text-to-image synthesis techniques to generate book covers from the summary and exhibit the results in this paper.