
3D cartoon face and cat face from one image - elliottwu
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/blog/unsupervised-learning-of-probably-symmetric-deformable-3d-objects-from-images-in-the-wild.html
======
amelius
Tech is in the uncanny valley.

What makes this especially disturbing is that pupils are sticking out in
almost all the examples.

------
hutzlibu
That fits a bit. My nephew today told me, he would like a game, where he can
draw a racecar (2D) and then be able to drive the car in the game. Sadly the
demo is for faces only, otherwise I might have hacked something together to
make it work ...

~~~
app4soft
> _where he can draw a racecar (2D) and then be able to drive the car in the
> game_

If your nephew just would draw outlined 2D car side view, then its would be
easy to convert it to 3D by extruding and in one two clicks export to
supported format for game.

Just two apps needed: _Inkscape_ \+ _Blender_

P.S.: If your nephew no need to play 3D game and top-view racing game (such as
_DustRacing2D_ [0]) is enough, possibly only Inkscape would be needed to draw
top view of racingcar for game.

[0]
[https://github.com/juzzlin/DustRacing2D](https://github.com/juzzlin/DustRacing2D)

~~~
hutzlibu
Yeah, I know, but his car designs usually also involve the front (it is all
about the gimmicks, fire and razors and I don't know what else). So a neuronal
network would definitely not be able to make a perfect model out of it, but
maybe enough to have a somewhat blurry version in tux cart for example.

But I will teach him blender soon, so we will get there eventually, but doing
it automated, would be very cool, too ;)

[https://supertuxkart.net/Legacy:Kart_Creation_Tutorial](https://supertuxkart.net/Legacy:Kart_Creation_Tutorial)

but doing this with a automated version, will be hard ...

------
SideburnsOfDoom
If you pick a cat face and turn it sideways, you can notice that the eyeball
isn't at all naturally rounded.

They should be spheres that stick out:
[http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/28300000/Cat-Eye-
Wall...](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/28300000/Cat-Eye-Wallpaper-
eyes-28331369-1680-1050.jpg)

------
recursive
I can't get this to do anything. It suggests choosing an example, but the list
of examples is empty.

~~~
londons_explore
Works for me in Chrome Linux. Try another browser?

There is a video demo further down the page which is much more informative
than the demo IMO.

------
djmips
I've seen a system that was more rules based that did this based on a set of
sampled head shapes and then you could fine tune the results by hand. One
thing that I noticed is that creating a mappable texture from a photo and
mapping it onto any reasonable 3D head model was already cool. In any case,
this particular attempt doesn't look better than previous techniques I have
seen. Every single head in this demo had a pronounced sloping forehead which
surely can't be the case for every input.

------
lisper
The TL;DR on how it works:

> we exploit the fact that many object categories have a bilateral symmetry.
> Assuming an object is perfectly symmetric, one can obtain a virtual second
> view of it by simply mirroring the image and perform 3D reconstruction using
> stereo geometry

That is pretty brilliant!

~~~
ge96
it says stereo so you need two pictures? I was thinking about the
photogramemtry technique, this is great... I mean I wonder how accurate it
is(with regard to depth calculation from images on a larger scale like feet)
but man impressive

~~~
lisper
> you need two pictures

No, that's the brilliant part. They use one image and apply the assumption
that it's a picture of a bilaterally-symmetric physical object in order to
produce a synthetic second image.

~~~
ge96
hmm probably have to watch the video more thoroughly it seems like you're
estimating/guessing the actual dimensions without a new source/angle to
compare for the depth aspect. showing my ignorance here -- trained, I guess it
depends on margin of error/does it matter, it seems pretty accurate

anyway this would be great with regard to reducing camera count if you're not
relying heavily on LIDAR or "physical time to flight" sources of measurement

------
genericlogic
I find it interesting that if you flip the image around it looks like it's
'sticking out'.

~~~
oon
I wanted to comment exactly this. The hollow face illusion

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-
Face_illusion?wprov=s...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-
Face_illusion?wprov=sfla1)

~~~
thedirt0115
And interestingly, not everyone sees the illusion:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27847925](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27847925)

------
elliottwu
Code:
[https://github.com/elliottwu/unsup3d](https://github.com/elliottwu/unsup3d)

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rPJyrU-
WE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rPJyrU-WE4)

------
yorwba
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22685053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22685053)

------
gweinberg
Their visual results are very impressive. But their speech synthesis seems
like 20th century quality.

------
mettamage
What it is also able to do: render cartoon personalities into more real
looking personalities.

~~~
tetris11
I was very disappointed that Naruto's scrappy good looks didn't make the 2D to
3D jump

------
sceptically
No https? :-(

