Xu Wang

Shizun Wang, Weihong Zeng, Xu Wang et al.

The creation of a parameterized stylized character involves careful selection of numerous parameters, also known as the "avatar vectors" that can be interpreted by the avatar engine. Existing unsupervised avatar vector estimation methods that auto-create avatars for users, however, often fail to work because of the domain gap between realistic faces and stylized avatar images. To this end, we propose SwiftAvatar, a novel avatar auto-creation framework that is evidently superior to previous works. SwiftAvatar introduces dual-domain generators to create pairs of realistic faces and avatar images using shared latent codes. The latent codes can then be bridged with the avatar vectors as pairs, by performing GAN inversion on the avatar images rendered from the engine using avatar vectors. Through this way, we are able to synthesize paired data in high-quality as many as possible, consisting of avatar vectors and their corresponding realistic faces. We also propose semantic augmentation to improve the diversity of synthesis. Finally, a light-weight avatar vector estimator is trained on the synthetic pairs to implement efficient auto-creation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SwiftAvatar on two different avatar engines. The superiority and advantageous flexibility of SwiftAvatar are also verified in both subjective and objective evaluations.

Yueming Lyu, Peibin Chen, Jingna Sun et al.

In recent years, conditional image synthesis has attracted growing attention due to its controllability in the image generation process. Although recent works have achieved realistic results, most of them have difficulty handling fine-grained styles with subtle details. To address this problem, a novel normalization module, named Detailed Region-Adaptive Normalization~(DRAN), is proposed. It adaptively learns both fine-grained and coarse-grained style representations. Specifically, we first introduce a multi-level structure, Spatiality-aware Pyramid Pooling, to guide the model to learn coarse-to-fine features. Then, to adaptively fuse different levels of styles, we propose Dynamic Gating, making it possible to adaptively fuse different levels of styles according to different spatial regions. Finally, we collect a new makeup dataset (Makeup-Complex dataset) that contains a wide range of complex makeup styles with diverse poses and expressions. To evaluate the effectiveness and show the general use of our method, we conduct a set of experiments on makeup transfer and semantic image synthesis. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that equipped with DRAN, simple baseline models are able to achieve promising improvements in complex style transfer and detailed texture synthesis. Both the code and the proposed dataset will be available at https://github.com/Yueming6568/DRAN-makeup.git.