Caricature is an exaggerated form of artistic portraiture that accentuates unique yet subtle characteristics of human faces. Recently, advancements in deep end-to-end techniques have yielded encouraging outcomes in capturing both style and elevated exaggerations in creating face caricatures. Most of these approaches tend to produce cartoon-like results that could be more practical for real-world applications. In this study, we proposed a high-quality, unpaired face caricature method that is appropriate for use in the real world and uses computer vision techniques and GAN models. We attain the exaggeration of facial features and the stylization of appearance through a two-step process: Face caricature generation and face caricature projection. The face caricature generation step creates new caricature face datasets from real images and trains a generative model using the real and newly created caricature datasets. The Face caricature projection employs an encoder trained with real and caricature faces with the pretrained generator to project real and caricature faces. We perform an incremental facial exaggeration from the real image to the caricature faces using the encoder and generator's latent space. Our projection preserves the facial identity, attributes, and expressions from the input image. Also, it accounts for facial occlusions, such as reading glasses or sunglasses, to enhance the robustness of our model. Furthermore, we conducted a comprehensive comparison of our approach with various state-of-the-art face caricature methods, highlighting our process's distinctiveness and exceptional realism.

翻译：漫画是一种夸张的艺术肖像形式，它凸显了人类面部独特而微妙的特征。近年来，深度端到端技术的进展在捕捉面部漫画创作中的风格与高度夸张方面取得了令人鼓舞的成果。然而，大多数现有方法往往生成类似卡通的结果，这在现实应用中可能不够实用。在本研究中，我们提出了一种适用于现实世界的高质量非配对面部漫画方法，该方法利用了计算机视觉技术和生成对抗网络模型。我们通过两步流程实现面部特征的夸张和外观的风格化：面部漫画生成和面部漫画投影。面部漫画生成步骤从真实图像中创建新的漫画面部数据集，并利用真实数据集与新创建的漫画数据集训练生成模型。面部漫画投影采用一个使用真实和漫画面部训练得到的编码器，结合预训练生成器，用于投影真实面部和漫画面部。我们利用编码器和生成器的潜在空间，从真实图像到漫画面部逐步实现面部夸张。我们的投影保留了输入图像的面部身份、属性及表情，同时考虑了面部遮挡（如阅读眼镜或太阳镜）以增强模型的鲁棒性。此外，我们将我们的方法与多种最先进的面部漫画方法进行了全面比较，突显了我们过程的独特性和卓越的真实感。