Machine-vision algorithms help craft realistic portraits from sketches

Computers have been capable of taking hand-drawn sketches and turning them into photorealistic images for some time now, but the color photographs that result haven't always been accurate. Obviously it's even more of a frustrating exercise for humans to tackle, let alone take even a cursory stab at. That's where a neural network educated by Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guclu and others at Radboud University in Denmark comes in. The process began with 200,000 images of faces pulled from the internet and converted them into drawings, grayscale and color sketches to teach a neural network with 11-layers to turn a sketch into a photograph of a face that could rival one actually taken by a camera. This went so far as to train the neural network, and then the team gave it one more go using a completely different set of data.