We present a novel method for automatic vectorized avatar generation from a single portrait image. Most existing approaches that create avatars rely on image-to-image translation methods, which present some limitations when applied to 3D rendering, animation, or video. Instead, we leverage modality-specific autoencoders trained on large-scale unpaired portraits and parametric avatars, and then learn a mapping between both modalities via an alignment module trained on a significantly smaller amount of data. The resulting cross-modal latent space preserves facial identity, producing more visually appealing and higher fidelity avatars than previous methods, as supported by our quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Moreover, our method’s virtue of being resolution-independent makes it highly versatile and applicable in a wide range of settings.

Language is ambiguous; many terms and expressions can convey the same idea. This is especially true in creative practice, where ideas and design intents are highly subjective. We present a dataset-Ambiguous Descriptions of Art Images (ADARI)-of contemporary workpieces, which aims to provide a foundational resource for subjective image description and multimodal word disambiguation in the context of creative practice. The dataset contains a total of 240k images labeled with 260k descriptive sentences. It is additionally organized into sub-domains of architecture, art, design, fashion, furniture, product design and technology. In subjective image description, labels do not necessarily correspond to well-defined entities i.e. cars, quantitative attributes such as the color red, or actions like playing. For example, the ambiguous label dynamic is a qualitative attribute of an extensive amount of objects and thus, the data's variance is high. To understand this complexity, we analyze the ambiguity and relevance of text with respect to images using the state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT model for sentence classification. We provide a baseline for multi-label classification tasks and demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches for understanding ambiguity in design intentions. We hope that ADARI dataset and baselines constitute a first step towards subjective label classification.

Robotic painting has been a subject of interest among both artists and roboticists since the 1970s. Researchers and interdisciplinary artists have employed various painting techniques and human-robot collaboration models to create visual mediums on canvas. One of the challenges of robotic painting is to apply a desired artistic style to the painting. Style transfer techniques with machine learning models have helped us address this challenge with the visual style of a specific painting. However, other manual elements of style, i.e., painting techniques and brushstrokes of an artist, have not been fully addressed.We propose a method to integrate an artistic style to the brushstrokes and the painting process through collaboration with a human artist. In this paper, we describe our approach to 1) collect brushstrokes and hand-brush motion samples from an artist, and 2) train a generative model to generate brushstrokes that pertains to the artist's style, and 3) fine tune a stroke-based rendering model to work with our robotic painting setup. We will report on the integration of these three steps in a separate publication. In a preliminary study, 71% of human evaluators find our reconstructed brushstrokes are pertaining to the characteristics of the artist's style. Moreover, 58% of participants could not distinguish a painting made by our method from a visually similar painting created by a human artist.