Generating Artistic Portraits from Face Photos with Feature Disentanglement and Reconstruction

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 5; p. 955
• Main Authors: Guo, Haoran, Ma, Zhe, Chen, Xuhesheng, Wang, Xukang, Xu, Jun, Zheng, Yangming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2024
• Subjects: Ablation; Datasets; Generative adversarial networks; Image processors; Image quality; Image reconstruction; Methods; Modules; Neural networks; Portraits; Synthesis; Wavelet transforms
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics13050955

Generating artistic portraits from face photos presents a complex challenge that requires high-quality image synthesis and a deep understanding of artistic style and facial features. Traditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have made significant strides in image synthesis; however, they encounter limitations in artistic portrait generation, particularly in the nuanced disentanglement and reconstruction of facial features and artistic styles. This paper introduces a novel approach that overcomes these limitations by employing feature disentanglement and reconstruction techniques, enabling the generation of artistic portraits that more faithfully retain the subject’s identity and expressiveness while incorporating diverse artistic styles. Our method integrates six key components: a U-Net-based image generator, an image discriminator, a feature-disentanglement module, a feature-reconstruction module, a U-Net-based information generator, and a cross-modal fusion module, working in concert to transform face photos into artistic portraits. Through extensive experiments on the APDrawing dataset, our approach demonstrated superior performance in visual quality, achieving a significant reduction in the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score to 61.23, highlighting its ability to generate more-realistic and -diverse artistic portraits compared to existing methods. Ablation studies further validated the effectiveness of each component in our method, underscoring the importance of feature disentanglement and reconstruction in enhancing the artistic quality of the generated portraits.