Interactive Cartoonization With Controllable Perceptual Factors

Namhyuk Ahn, Patrick Kwon, Jihye Back, Kibeom Hong, Seungkwon Kim; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 16827-16835

Cartoonization is a task that renders natural photos into cartoon styles. Previous deep methods only have focused on end-to-end translation, disabling artists from manipulating results. To tackle this, in this work, we propose a novel solution with editing features of texture and color based on the cartoon creation process. To do that, we design a model architecture to have separate decoders, texture and color, to decouple these attributes. In the texture decoder, we propose a texture controller, which enables a user to control stroke style and abstraction to generate diverse cartoon textures. We also introduce an HSV color augmentation to induce the networks to generate consistent color translation. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first method to control the cartoonization during the inferences step, generating high-quality results compared to baselines.