Guided Face Cartoon Synthesis

In this paper, we propose a new method, called guided synthesis, to synthesize a face cartoon from a face photo. The guided synthesis is defined as a local linear model, which generates a cartoon image by incorporating the content of guidance images taken from the training set. Our synthesis operation is achieved based on four weight functions. The first is a photo-photo weight that aims to measure the similarity between an input photo patch and a training photo patch. The second is defined as a photo-cartoon weight, which is used to compute the likelihood by computing the similarity between a cartoon patch and an input photo patch. The third weight is defined in the synthesized photos, which is to set a smoothness constraint between neighboring synthesized patches. The final weight is designed to evaluate the similarity of a synthesized patch to an input patch based on the spatial distance. Experimental evaluation on a number of face photos demonstrates the good performance of the proposed method on the face cartoon synthesis.