G2L-CariGAN: Caricature Generation from Global Structure to Local Features

Abstract Existing GAN-based approaches to caricature generation mainly focus on exaggerating a character’s global facial structure. This often leads to the failure in highlighting significant facial features such as big eyes and hook nose. To address this limitation, we propose a new approach termed as G2L-CariGAN, which uses feature maps of spatial dimensions instead of latent codes for geometric exaggeration. G2L-CariGAN first exaggerates the global facial structure of the character on a low-dimensional feature map and then exaggerates its local facial features on a high-dimensional feature map. Moreover, we develop a caricature identity loss function based on feature maps, which well retains the character's identity after exaggeration. Our experiments have demonstrated that G2L-CariGAN outperforms the state-of-arts in terms of the quality of exaggerating a character and retaining its identity.