Creating a professional anime portrait with artificial intelligence assistance is challenging due to the unique characteristics and abstract nature of the anime art style. Input sketches made by general users during the drawing process often lack detail and shape information, adding to the complexity. To tackle this challenge, researchers from Japan have developed a novel high-quality anime portrait drawing assistance system (AniFaceDrawing) which enables even beginners to create anime drawings of professional standards. The primary challenge lies with the generation of suitable reference images corresponding with the incomplete and abstract strokes made during the freehand drawing process.
To tackle this problem, a research team from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) and Waseda University in Japan, sought to develop a novel generative AI tool that offers progressive drawing assistance and helps generate anime portraits from freehand sketches. The tool is based on a sketch-to-image (S2I) deep learning framework that matches raw sketches with latent vectors of the generative model. It employs a two-stage training strategy through the pre-trained Style Generative Adversarial Network (StyleGAN), a state-of-the-art generative model that uses adversarial networks to generate new images.
More information:
https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/whatsnew/press/2023/08/03-1.html