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Learning to Cartoonize Using White-Box Cartoon Representations
- ashleyn 6y agoBe great to see this in a fragment shader someday.
- taneq 6y agoIf I understand this right, they've built a 'cartoonify' filter to convert real-world images into cartoon format, and then trained a neural net based on these image pairs? If so, what does the neural net add?
- sk0g 6y agoSorta, it breaks down the images (from anime?) into three representations - surface, structure, and details, and also extracts each of those representations from generated images. Those representations are then cross-checked by the adverserial network, which improves the GAN's anime-esque generation ability.
- ramblerman 6y agoKind of agree, I think if they have a good way to create the underlying dataset, a NN to go in the opposite direction might be more interesting.
- amelius 6y agoThis would be very similar to the "super-resolution" approach. E.g., https://medium.com/beyondminds/an-introduction-to-super-resolution-using-deep-learning-f60aff9a499d https://medium.com/beyondminds/an-introduction-to-super-reso...
- travbrack 6y agoI know in the case of physics simulations the neural net can perform better than the classical algorithm. Not sure if that's the case here but just thought it was worth mentioning.
- conradludgate 6y agoBy "perform better" I assume you mean time/memory performance and not accuracy
- xwdv 6y agoI could have sworn this kind of thing already exist in some apps. Prism?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYeah, looks exactly like some of the Prism filtering I've toyed with.
- ggm 6y agoRotoscope?
- talaketu 6y agoThe terms "White-box model" and "Black-box model" mentioned in the paper seem to be standard terms from the ML literature, though I didn't understand precisely what they meant here. I know the metaphor: As we can see inside a white box but not inside a black box, so we can observe the inner workings of a white box model. Similar terminology is used for other domains such as system design and testing. The conclusion here, broadly, is that white-box is better than black-box for this application. Is there a modern terminology that avoids concerns about racial bias in language?
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoI would probably use transparent and opaque.
- ben_w 6y agoI was about to suggest “open box” and “sealed box”. The terms “black box” and “white box” just don’t do a very good job of illuminating the concepts they represent to people new to the field — white doesn’t mean transparent.
- PaulBGD_ 6y agoI'm curious how this is racial? Light is white, a lack of light is black.
- core-questions 6y agoI guess you've missed the last few weeks in virtue signalling
- Normille 6y agoTo avoid accusations of racism, use "double-plus-un-white" instead of "black"
- gitgud 6y ago> "The conclusion here, broadly, is that white-box is better than black-box for this application." Well I think this is incorrect. Generally speaking, a black-box exposes an interface that you can use, and a white-box is something you can internally modify. One is not necessarily better than the other. Using a white-box approach can create tight-coupling between components in a system as you could be relying on internal mechanisms, whereas a black-box approach enforces boundaries in your system which is generally good. Also, it's often better to test systems with a black-box mentality to ensure security, resilience etc... It's not inherently representing good/bad, however modern terms like, opaque/transparent might be more accurate and less controversial I suppose.
- xingyzt 6y agoThis could replace all of the WikiHow illustrators that trace from stock photos, and muddle the waters even more for their copyright status. https://onezero.medium.com/we-finally-figured-out-who-makes-wikihows-bizarre-art-6c5d69b71347 https://onezero.medium.com/we-finally-figured-out-who-makes-...
- cheerlessbog 6y agoThank you for that very amusing article.
- enriquto 6y agoIt's probably much harder to arrange people and objects to reproduce such a scene than to make a basic wikihow-style drawing.
- patel011393 6y agoTo a certain extent, PowerPoint's "Artistic Features" option under "Picture Format" allows for similar effects. The paintbrush options is like this cartoon style. If I had the time, I'd definitely choose this cartoon program, as PowerPoint's effect is not as clean.
- dzink 6y agoThe big question: Does copyright law apply to cartoon version of copyrighted images? Transformative work can circumvent copyright law, but are you allowed to feed copyrighted images into an AI algorithm to create cartooned versions? Who owns the copyright at that point?
- jrockway 6y agoI don't see any reason why copyright would not apply. If you take someone else's photograph, change the white balance, and start selling copies of it, that's classic copyright infringement. As for input data to models, my intuition is that they would be tainted by the copyright of the input images. It's just that nobody has a bot for scanning AI models for their photographs, so you don't see a lot of litigation or DMCA takedown requests here. It's easy when someone just uploads your photo to their website. It's hard when the photo contributes some weights to a neural network. My main takeaway is that copyright is very imperfect. It doesn't allow for any unsolicited enhancements of someone else's work.
- ximeng 6y agoYou'll get further issues once Getty Images automatically generates copyrighted images covering as much of the latent space of interesting images as possible.
- rcxdude 6y agoIn principle by the way copyright works this isn't really an issue: if an image is generated independently then copyright does not apply. However, in the event that you wind up with something similar, it becomes something which you would need to prove (and people have lost cases because they could not). On the other hand, such large-scale generation of images will likely be treated differently by the courts than other means of production.
- rcxdude 6y agoIndeed, people often seem to assume that the output of GANs are free of the copyright of the training data, but this has not been tested in court and I get the impression the legal opinion leans towards that it does, which makes the copyright status of most GANs (and in fact most neural nets) a pretty huge mess.
- thih9 6y agoI really like the cartoonized photos of detailed landscapes. I think human faces and bokeh could use some improvement. The former seems especially tricky; showing or hiding certain lines might change the perceived emotion and result in a different image.
- fxtentacle 6y agoWhile the results certainly are pretty, I don't see how learning has taken place. This cartoon filter still has the same issues as previous attempts, which is: - omitting borders that are semantically important but have a low color gradient - not collapsing small areas into lines For the first issue, there's an example image of a picnic on white background. A human cartoonist would most likely draw a full outline around the white spoon, because it is important for conveying the type of object that this is supposed to be. With this algorithm, the spoon gets partially merged with the white background and without the reference photo I would have a hard time identifying it as a spoon. For the second issue, kook at the photo of the Asian girl with patterned skirt. A human cartoonist would most likely observe the regular grid pattern and replace it with thin lines, thereby communicating that all of it is one same thing. This algorithm, on the other hand, treats each tile of the pattern individually, thereby making it look more like a crystal or crumbled foil. I personally also prefer white-box algorithms, but there's no denying that creating a cartoon requires a lot of prior knowledge about which features to retain as important and which features to abstract away. As such, I see the real challenge in somehow producing good saliency training data for millions of images. I mean ideally you would want the 5 year video stream plus eye tracking data of a baby starting to grow up...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> For the second issue, kook at the photo of the Asian girl with patterned skirt. A human cartoonist would most likely observe the regular grid pattern and replace it with thin lines, thereby communicating that all of it is one same thing. This algorithm, on the other hand, treats each tile of the pattern individually, thereby making it look more like a crystal or crumbled foil. Something similar is going on with the photo of the merlion statue. The entire body is scaled, and a cartoonist would definitely represent that. But (because of lighting?), the algorithm renders the tail smooth instead of scaled.
- posterboy 6y agoAssume this were a photo in a pictureframe in the background of a bigger picture
- amelius 6y agoI didn't even notice these pictures were "cartoonized" until I zoomed in on my smartphone ... If you make an imaging effect, please make sure it works at all scales. And I'm also looking at you bokeh-folks ;)
- wnkrshm 6y agoThose images that don't already work because of their colors and composition have the charme of traced photos.