Researchers use neural networks to turn face sketches into photos

We all have a soft spot for Prisma, the app that turns smartphone photos into stylized artwork. But the reverse process -- transforming artwork into pictures -- is no less fascinating. And it's not far from becoming real, researchers in the Netherlands said. A team of four neuroscientists at Radboud University is working on a model for inverting face sketches to synthesize photorealistic face images by using deep neural networks. The results of the study (Convolutional Sketch Inversion) were first made available in the online archive arXiv and have recently been accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Amsterdam.