dualFace:Two-Stage Drawing Guidance for Freehand Portrait Sketching

TL;DR

dualFace is a two-stage portrait drawing interface that guides users globally with contour suggestions and locally with detailed synthesis, improving the quality of freehand face sketches for users of varying skill levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-stage guidance system combining image retrieval and deep generative models to assist in freehand portrait sketching.

Findings

Significantly improves sketch detail quality

Helps users with different skill levels

Validated through user study

Abstract

In this paper, we propose dualFace, a portrait drawing interface to assist users with different levels of drawing skills to complete recognizable and authentic face sketches. dualFace consists of two-stage drawing assistance to provide global and local visual guidance: global guidance, which helps users draw contour lines of portraits (i.e., geometric structure), and local guidance, which helps users draws details of facial parts (which conform to user-drawn contour lines), inspired by traditional artist workflows in portrait drawing. In the stage of global guidance, the user draws several contour lines, and dualFace then searches several relevant images from an internal database and displays the suggested face contour lines over the background of the canvas. In the stage of local guidance, we synthesize detailed portrait images with a deep generative model from user-drawn contour lines, but use the synthesized results as detailed drawing guidance. We conducted a user study to verify the effectiveness of dualFace, and we confirmed that dualFace significantly helps achieve a detailed portrait sketch. see http://www.jaist.ac.jp/~xie/dualface.html