English

AniGAN: Style-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Anime Face Generation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021-03-30 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to translate a portrait photo-face into an anime appearance. Our aim is to synthesize anime-faces which are style-consistent with a given reference anime-face. However, unlike typical translation tasks, such anime-face translation is challenging due to complex variations of appearances among anime-faces. Existing methods often fail to transfer the styles of reference anime-faces, or introduce noticeable artifacts/distortions in the local shapes of their generated faces. We propose AniGAN, a novel GAN-based translator that synthesizes high-quality anime-faces. Specifically, a new generator architecture is proposed to simultaneously transfer color/texture styles and transform local facial shapes into anime-like counterparts based on the style of a reference anime-face, while preserving the global structure of the source photo-face. We propose a double-branch discriminator to learn both domain-specific distributions and domain-shared distributions, helping generate visually pleasing anime-faces and effectively mitigate artifacts. Extensive experiments on selfie2anime and a new face2anime dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The new dataset is available at https://github.com/bing-li-ai/AniGAN .

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.12593,
  title  = {AniGAN: Style-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Anime Face Generation},
  author = {Bing Li and Yuanlue Zhu and Yitong Wang and Chia-Wen Lin and Bernard Ghanem and Linlin Shen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.12593},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:29:26.515Z