AI Generator Learns to 'Draw' Like Cartoonist Lee Mal-Nyeon in Just 10 Hours

A Seoul National University Master's student and developer has trained a face generating model to transfer normal face photographs into cartoon images in the distinctive style of Lee Mal-nyeon. The student (GitHub user name: bryandlee) used webcomics images by South Korean cartoonist Lee Mal-nyeon (이말년) as input data, building a dataset of malnyun cartoon faces then testing popular deep generative models on it. By combining a pretrained face generating model with special training techniques, they were able to train a generator at 256 256 resolution in just 10 hours on a single RTX 2080ti GPU, using only 500 manually annotated images. Since the cascade classifier for human faces provided in OpenCV-- a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real-time computer vision -- did not work well on the cartoon domain, the student manually annotated 500 input cartoon face images. The student incorporated FreezeD, a simple yet effective baseline for transfer learning of GANs proposed earlier this year by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and POSTECH ( Pohang University of Science and Technology) researchers to reduce the burden of heavy data and computational resources when training GANs. The developer tested the idea of freezing the early layers of the generator in transfer learning settings on the proposed FreezeG (freezing generator) and found that "it worked pretty well."