AI-Powered DeepFaceDrawing Turns Sketches Into Photorealistic Portraits - The Flighter

A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the City University of Hong Kong have unveiled DeepFaceDrawing, an AI-powered framework that turns sketches into photorealistic portraits. This deep learning system uses modules to generate the images, or in other words, it identifies the most notable facial features individually, like the eyes, nose, mouth, face shape, etc., before these vectors are merged to create realistic images. There are other deep image-to-image translation techniques that may generate face images from freehand sketches faster, but they require professional sketches or even edge maps as input. DeepFaceDrawing can implicitly model the shape space of recognizable face images and then proceeds to synthesize a face image in this space to approximate an input sketch. Our method essentially uses input sketches as soft constraints and is thus able to produce high-quality face images even from rough and/or incomplete sketches," said researcher Shu-Yu Chen.