Thursday, July 18, 2019

Your Face as an Old Master Portrait


A new website lets you upload a photo of yourself and it will modify it to look like an old master painting.

This is not an example of style transfer that we've seen before on the blog. The AI erases smiles and changes lines, colors, and shapes, and it decides on which period art style to use. 


With this system, according to their website, "anyone is able to use GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) models to generate a new painting, where facial lines are completely redesigned. The model decides for itself which style to use for the portrait. Details of the face and background contribute to direct the model towards a style. In style transfer, there is usually a strong alteration of colors, but the features of the photo remain unchanged. AI Portraits Ars creates new forms, beyond altering the style of an existing photo."
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See a gallery and try it out at AI Portraits
Article about the algorithm on Fast Company: AI Portraits
Thanks, Armand
at

8 comments:

  1. RichJuly 18, 2019 at 4:30 PM

    Looks like a good business concept:
    Everyone may be hanging on the wall, portrayed by Rembrandt or Da Vinci:-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. David KingJuly 18, 2019 at 7:12 PM

    On one photo I submitted it said I didn't have a face! On two others neither really looked like me, but they look kind of cool so I might use one as an avatar anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Penny TaylorJuly 19, 2019 at 6:04 AM

    It apparently doesn't like me... keeps saying no photo (or picture) detected... (sigh)

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeffJuly 19, 2019 at 8:19 AM

    I tried it on a picture of my wife. Interesting program but the only resemblance is that the computer version also has a nose and 2 eyes. Maybe version or or 3 will do better.

    ReplyDelete
  5. James GurneyJuly 19, 2019 at 8:51 AM

    Penny, I sympathize. For me it said to try later because they were getting too much traffic.

    Jeff, yes, apparently in applying art-style changes to the images, it loses the likeness. Its lack of insight becomes apparent.

    David, I wonder what it needs to reach the threshold of a face.

    Rich, it's funny how realist artists through time have tried to get beyond tricks and styles, but to a computer, each period of art is just a set of recognizable conventions.

    ReplyDelete
  6. arturoquimicoJuly 19, 2019 at 1:45 PM

    I still appeared fat, old and goofy looking...

    ReplyDelete
  7. RichJuly 19, 2019 at 3:40 PM

    In chess, computers have proved themselves superior to humans (Deep Blue).
    My guess is, this may happen in certain provinces of painting as well.

    But on the whole; Inspiration seems to be beyond AI-Artificial Intelligence.

    ReplyDelete
  8. David KingJuly 19, 2019 at 7:19 PM

    James, the photo I tried that "didn't have a face" is the same one in my Blogger avatar, albeit a higher resolution version. Maybe the hat and shadow under the hat hid too much for it to recognize the face.

    ReplyDelete

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