CariPainter: Sketch Guided Interactive Caricature Generation

Xin Huang, Dong Liang, Hongrui Cai, Juyong Zhang, Jinyuan Jia

Abstract: In this paper, we propose CariPainter, the first interactive caricature generating and editing method. The main challenge of caricature generation lies in the fact that it not only exaggerates the facial geometry but also refreshes the facial texture. We solve this challenging problem by utilizing the semantic segmentation maps as an intermediary domain, removing the influence of photo texture while preserving the person-specific geometry features. Specifically, our proposed method consists of two main components: CariSketchNet and CariMaskGAN. CariSketchNet exaggerates the photo segmentation map to construct CariMask. Then, CariMask is converted into a caricature by CariMaskGAN. In this step, users can edit and adjust the geometry of caricatures freely. Additionally, we propose a semantic detail pre-processing approach, which considerably increases details of generated images and allows modification of hair strands, wrinkles, and beards. Extensive experimental results show that our method produces higher-quality caricatures as well as supports easily used interactive modification.