Abstraction-perception preserving cartoon face synthesis

Portrait cartoonization aims at translating a portrait image to its cartoon version, which guarantees two conditions, namely, reducing textural details and synthesizing cartoon facial features (e.g., big eyes or line-drawing nose). To address this problem, we propose a two-stage training scheme based on GAN, which is powerful for stylization problems. The abstraction stage with a novel abstractive loss is used to reduce textural details. Meanwhile, the perception stage is adopted to synthesize cartoon facial features. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method and other state-of-the-art methods for portrait cartoonization, we contribute a new challenging large-scale dataset named CartoonFace10K. In addition, we find that the popular metric FID focuses on the target style yet ignores the preservation of the input image content. We thus introduce a novel metric FISI, which compromises FID and SSIM to focus on both target features and retaining input content. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.