Hierarchical Vectorization for Portrait Images

Aiming at developing intuitive and easy-to-use portrait editing tools, we propose a novel vectorization method that can automatically convert raster images into a 3-tier hierarchical representation. The base layer consists of a set of sparse diffusion curves (DC) which characterize salient geometric features and low-frequency colors and provide means for semantic color transfer and facial expression editing. The middle level encodes specular highlights and shadows to large and editable Poisson regions (PR) and allows the user to directly adjust illumination via tuning the strength and/or changing shape of PR. The top level contains two types of pixel-sized PRs for high-frequency residuals and fine details such as pimples and pigmentation. We also train a deep generative model that can produce high-frequency residuals automatically. Thanks to the meaningful organization of vector primitives, editing portraits becomes easy and intuitive. In particular, our method supports color transfer, facial expression editing, highlight and shadow editing and automatic retouching. Thanks to the linearity of the Laplace operator, we introduce alpha blending, linear dodge and linear burn to vector editing and show that they are effective in editing highlights and shadows. To quantitatively evaluate the results, we extend the commonly used FLIP metric (which measures differences between two images) by considering illumination. The new metric, called illumination-sensitive FLIP or IS-FLIP, can effectively capture the salient changes in color transfer results, and is more consistent with human perception than FLIP and other quality measures on portrait images. We evaluate our method on the FFHQR dataset and show that our method is effective for common portrait editing tasks, such as retouching, light editing, color transfer and expression editing. We will make the code and trained models publicly available.

Flexible Portrait Image Editing with Fine-Grained Control

We develop a new method for portrait image editing, which supports fine-grained editing of geometries, colors, lights and shadows using a single neural network model. We adopt a novel asymmetric conditional GAN architecture: the generators take the transformed conditional inputs, such as edge maps, color palette, sliders and masks, that can be directly edited by the user; the discriminators take the conditional inputs in the way that can guide controllable image generation more effectively. Taking color editing as an example, we feed color palettes (which can be edited easily) into the generator, and color maps (which contain positional information of colors) into the discriminator. We also design a region-weighted discriminator so that higher weights are assigned to more important regions, like eyes and skin. Using a color palette, the user can directly specify the desired colors of hair, skin, eyes, lip and background. Color sliders allow the user to blend colors in an intuitive manner. The user can also edit lights and shadows by modifying the corresponding masks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating it on the CelebAMask-HQ dataset with a wide range of tasks, including geometry/color/shadow/light editing, hand-drawn sketch to image translation, and color transfer. We also present ablation studies to justify our design.