We present CaricatureBooth, a system that transforms caricature creation into a simple interactive experience – as easy as using a photo booth! A key challenge in caricature generation is two-fold: the scarcity of high-quality caricature data and the difficulty in enabling precise creative control over the exaggeration process while maintaining identity. Prior approaches either require large-scale caricature and photo data or lack intuitive mechanisms for users to guide the deformation without losing identity. We address the data scarcity by synthesising training data through Thin Plate Spline (TPS) deformation of standard face images. For creative control, we design a Bézier curve interface where users can easily manipulate facial features, with these edits then driving TPS transformations at inference time. When combined with a pre-trained ID-preserving diffusion model, our system maintains both identity preservation and creative flexibility. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CaricatureBooth achieves state-of-the-art quality while making the joy of caricature creation as accessible as taking a photo – just walk in and walk out with your personalised caricature! Code is available at https://github.com/WinKawaks/CaricatureBooth.

Although diffusion prior is rising as a powerful solution for blind face restoration (BFR), the inherent gap between the vanilla diffusion model and BFR settings hinders its seamless adaptation. The gap mainly stems from the discrepancy between 1) high-quality (HQ) and low-quality (LQ) images and 2) synthesized and real-world images. The vanilla diffusion model is trained on images with no or less degradations, whereas BFR handles moderately to severely degraded images. Additionally, LQ images used for training are synthesized by a naive degradation model with limited degradation patterns, which fails to simulate complex and unknown degradations in real-world scenarios. In this work, we use a unified network FLIPNET that switches between two modes to resolve specific gaps. In Restoration mode, the model gradually integrates BFR-oriented features and face embeddings from LQ images to achieve authentic and faithful face restoration. In Degradation mode, the model synthesizes real-world like degraded images based on the knowledge learned from real-world degradation datasets. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets show that our model 1) outperforms previous diffusion prior based BFR methods in terms of authenticity and fidelity, and 2) outperforms the naive degradation model in modeling the real-world degradations.

Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA), a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints, is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response, we present DreamWire, an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribbles, freeing them from intricate 3D wire organisation. Our approach synergises 3D Bézier curves, Prim's algorithm, and knowledge distillation from diffusion models or their variants (e.g., ControlNet). This blend enables the system to represent 3D wire art, ensuring spatial continuity and overcoming data scarcity. Extensive evaluation and analysis are conducted to shed insight on the inner workings of the proposed system, including the trade-off between connectivity and visual aesthetics.

Vector drawings are innately interactive as they preserve creational cues. Despite this desirable property they remain relatively under explored due to the difficulties in modeling complex vector drawings. This is in part due to the primarily _sequential and auto-regressive nature_ of existing approaches failing to scale beyond simple drawings. In this paper, we define generative models over _highly complex_ vector drawings by first representing them as “stroke-clouds” – _sets_ of arbitrary cardinality comprised of semantically meaningful strokes. The dimensionality of the strokes is a design choice that allows the model to adapt to a range of complexities. We learn to encode these _set of strokes_ into compact latent codes by a probabilistic reconstruction procedure backed by _De-Finetti’s Theorem of Exchangability_. The parametric generative model is then defined over the latent vectors of the encoded stroke-clouds. The resulting “Latent stroke-cloud generator (LSG)” thus captures the distribution of complex vector drawings on an implicit _set space_. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model on complex drawings (a newly created Anime line-art dataset) through a range of generative tasks.

This paper, for the very first time, introduces human sketches to the landscape of XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence). We argue that sketch as a “human-centred” data form, represents a natural interface to study explainability. We focus on cultivating sketch-specific explainability designs. This starts by identifying strokes as a unique building block that offers a degree of flexibility in object construction and manipulation impossible in photos. Following this, we design a simple explainability-friendly sketch encoder that accommodates the intrinsic properties of strokes: shape, location, and order. We then move on to define the first ever XAI task for sketch, that of stroke location inversion (SLI). Just as we have heat maps for photos, and correlation matrices for text, SLI offers an explainability angle to sketch in terms of asking a network how well it can recover stroke locations of an unseen sketch. We offer qualitative results for readers to interpret as snapshots of the SLI process in the paper, and as GIFs on the project page. A minor but interesting note is that thanks to its sketch-specific design, our sketch encoder also yields the best sketch recognition accuracy to date while having the smallest number of parameters. The code is available at https://sketchxai.github.io.

Heading estimation using inertial sensors built‐in smartphones has been considered as a central problem for indoor pedestrian navigation. For practical daily lives, it is necessary for heading estimation to allow an unconstrained use of smartphones, which means the varying device carrying positions and orientations. As a result, three special human body motion states, namely, random hand movements, carrying position transitions, and user turns, are introduced. However, most existing heading estimation approaches neglect the three motion states, which may render large estimation errors. We propose a robust heading estimation system adapting to the unconstrained use of smartphones. A novel detection and classification method is developed to detect the three motion states timely and discriminate them accurately. For normal working, the user heading is estimated by a PCA‐based approach. If a user turn occurs, it is estimated by adding horizontal heading change to previous user heading directly. If one of the other two motion states occurs, it is obtained by averaging estimation results of the adjacent normal walking steps. Finally, an outlier filtering algorithm is developed to smooth the estimation results. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of handling the unconstrained situation of smartphones and outperforms previous approaches in terms of accuracy and applicability.

Accuracy performance of WiFi fingerprinting positioning systems deteriorates severely when signal attenuations caused by human body are not considered. Previous studies have proposed WiFi fingerprinting positioning based on user orientation using compasses built in smartphones. However, compasses always cannot provide required accuracy of user orientation estimation due to the severe indoor magnetic perturbations. More importantly, we discover that not only user orientations but also smartphone carrying positions may affect signal attenuations caused by human body greatly. Therefore, we propose a novel WiFi fingerprinting positioning approach considering both user orientations and smartphone carrying positions. For user orientation estimation, we deploy Rotation Matrix and Principal Component Analysis (RMPCA) approach. For carrying position recognition, we propose a robust Random Forest classifier based on the developed orientation invariant features. Experimental results show that the proposed WiFi positioning approach may improve positioning accuracy significantly.