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Ah! Gets excited.

1. Clicks on the browse button to find a good selfie.

2. Uploads the pic to Toonify.

3. Clicks on 'Toonify' button:

> Failed: Didn't find any faces in the supplied image.

Ack what? Ok. The machine is still learning.

(P.S: I like the project though. Hope it will improve over time. But toonification of any pic without deep learning/machine learning thrown into the mix is already a solved problem, no?)

Same here- looks incredible but no face found :(
If you were trying on iphone this should probably work now.
We're using dlib's frontal face detector for the face detection. It's ok, but certainly not state of the art, maybe in the future I'll find a better face detector...
The way I solved this for Faceweave is, if no face detected, let the operation proceed anyway. This gives the user the ability to line up the face themselves.

The logic is basically: ask dlib for face landmarks; if no landmarks, resize image to 1024x1024 and proceed; otherwise align face.

If you happen to like lisp: https://github.com/shawwn/stylegan-server/blob/10c396fa2ef07...

Also, congratulations on launching this! Super exciting.

Readers, if you use twitter, be sure to follow the creators:

Justin https://twitter.com/Buntworthy

Doron https://twitter.com/Norod78

Been following them for like twenty years now. They tweet a bunch of awesome stuff about ML, and stylegan in particular.

I tried my face with two different backgrounds but nothing. I guess I just have one of those faces! (might be a good thing)
At you on iPhone?

Rotate your phone 90° clockwise then try again.

By default the portrait image will be rotated, causing the face detection to fail. I know this because I‘ve run in to the same problem before, had to correct it server side :)

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It seems to turn every male into an Indian.
Presumably there is some kind of bias in the training set causing this. It does seem subtle but noticeable, although I wouldn't say it's just the males.
> We don't store any of the images uploaded or generated. Once the toonification has finished running no images are kept on our systems.

I imagine this is all in good fun, but this disclaimer doesn't rule out data being derived from your face and stored or sold later.

I made this and can assure you I'm not doing anything with the images. This is just a silly side project of mine (along with Doron). I'm certainly not hoping to gain any money or data from it!
You should probably put this in the disclaimer. These days I assume all toys like this are data gathering tools in disguise. And I'm right more often than not.
He won't do that. then he cant sell the data later.
Could he do that though? I mean, hypothetically. I'm based in the EU so GDPR applies, and a picture of my face is definitely personally identifying info. So, unless I clicked something saying I consent to the data be stored/sold, I assume it would be illegal to do so.
Can you update the FAQ to stipulate that you aren't collecting face data too?

Because right now you say you're not doing anything with the images, that doesn't rule out collecting face data and storing that instead.

If you wanted faces for data, this would not be the way to do it. You could easily get 1000x photos of faces with a simple web scraper.
Loved the results. Worked fine for me. Tried with a 28Kb JPEG image with lot of noise, but turned out good.
I'll be really impressed when one of these that actually retains some of the original facial features instead of just replacing them entirely. Cool side project though.
@OP, for images from iOS, portrait photos are uploaded in landscape mode, and you need to rotate them before the image pipeline.

Currently I believe that is what is causing your facial detection step to fail.

If you want to try this on iOS, rotate your phone clockwise 90 degrees then take a photo.

Yes, I'd just come to that conclusion too. (Thanks for the tip anyway). I've just pushed an update so this should work now.
It made me look rather a bit horrifying! But fun stuff, nice work!
this is cute, but to be honest, the celebrity ones are pretty bad - they don't really look like the person nor capture their spirit, with a few exceptions: Tim Allen and Gal Gadot are quite good and Will Smith is alright. Some especially bad ones: Leo DiCaprio, Barack Obama, Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba, Ryan Gosling, Robert DeNiro
I agree, they don't "capture their spirit". No, you are not picky.
I think Leo and Scarlett are pretty bad, but the other ones seem okay?
Oh, I didn't click "more." Still, I think most of them look reasonably okay. Pretty cool!
Beardy people end up looking..... scary.
I saw that too. I have a rather long beard, and my toonified photo was -- horrifying.
If you need some nightmare fuel, try running the output back through for another round of toonification four or five more times.
This is so cool! I'm curious, how much does it cost to run a server that does deep learning inference on the scale of hugged-by-hn-frontpage?
There are two plausible measures of success for something like this:

1) Whether the generated character is readily identifiable by an observer on its own.

2) Whether the generated character is a reasonable manifestation of the chosen art style.

I think it does a reasonable job of #2 and a mediocre job on average of #1. I think greater eyebrow variability would help some so that it doesn't look like all the women get "woman's pencil eyebrow" and all the men get "man's extremely bushy eyebrow".

Feature request: webcam support.
Have you tried using an unpaired image-to-image translation algorithm, like CycleGANs?
Oh hey, more data gathering.
I look awful! LOL guess i dont have a future as a toon. LOL
Not looking good here either, for once I’m happy with my original photo.

Oddly enough, I bet if the output was designed to always generate more attractive features (ala insta filters), this will take off.

Maybe I don’t high cheekbones or a chiseled jaw, but lie to me dammit!

Just a tip.

I decided to make this go full circle and grabbed a picture from thispersondoesnotexist.com, and toonified it. It worked fine.

I for one welcome the singularity and all it entails.

Interesting idea!
I know the answer is no, but anyway I could generate a full-blown character model from this ?
Surprisingly yes!

Or rather, the answer is "no" right now, but I will bet you $500 that it'll be "yes" within ... hm ... 2 years max. And if I lower my bet to $100, I'll do 1 year max.

Let's just say it's a very lucrative, very active area of research.

One observation: facial detection gives you landmarks, and those landmarks are essentially UVs for a texture. So if you do that process repeatedly, and rotate the face slightly using latent directions, then you can back-project the result onto a 2D texture.

EDIT: Some leads: https://twitter.com/Zergfriend/status/1283954193946906625

A video from July: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvk3dtdeXBE&ab_channel=Compu...

And I saw someone use Unity to learn normal+bump+diffuse+ambient occlusion maps using ML, but sadly haven't been able to find the link yet.

This search gives lots of useful results: https://twitter.com/search?q=stylegan%20texture&src=typed_qu...

Very very cool. I could see this being intergrated into something like fortnight in the very near future.

If I was a better coder I'd being trying to get an Epic Grant for this. I can't imagine getting a full blown model would take more than a few hundred thousand

I know HN is not normal, but I immediately tried my pets since I'm not happy to give out photos.

Didn't work, it can't find the face.

Otherwise it worked ok on the fascist leaders I tried. Black and white got color added. And one photo had an artefact put on top of both the original and the Toonify, a mirror of the top of the image to fill space perhaps?

Well done.

Also Startup idea, facial recognition for pets and sell the data to the Russians for addition tracking ability on people through proxies.

Welp, that'll replace the whale in me nightmares.
...wait what. I need to know more about these nightmares that involves whales. Did you stumble across a particularly vivid bit of whaler fan fiction that combined Melville with Lovecraft or something?
Not sure what models you trained against, but my wife looks like a Kardashian. Think I can see Ray J behind her.

I look like a drunk Simpson... Barney.

Spot on!!

Good grief! I know I'm not Prince Charming but I was hoping for slightly less Shrek in mine. I think I'll be going back on that diet...
It shrekify's all men look at leo in the examples. I think it was mostly trained on women's faces. Those seem to get better results.
LOL. My wife said "you look like the dad from the Croods." It definitely seems to over caveman a bit, but I liked it!
I had the same experience. I'm not quite that much of a knuckle dragger.

https://imgur.com/a/4YqFPVl

> If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work.

That surprised me, I didn't expect an image hosting website to require JS.

How else could they render the pixels? /s
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