This App That Turns People Into Pixar-Like Cartoon Characters Gets The Internet Buzzing (23 Pics)
Interview With ArtistYou've probably heard what crazy stuff AI, machine learning, and deep learning technologies are capable of. Like creating portraits of people who don’t exist, or making a 15th-century Renaissance painting out of your picture, or turning your static single selfie into a living image. Sounds crazy, because it is, but it turns out, this is not all.
Two programmers and AI enthusiasts, Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler, have just created a new mind-bending "toonification" system that basically turns your portrait into a cute cartoon character. Thanks to deep learning, the algorithm fine-tunes the original face and blends it with a cartoon model, keeping the identities the same, but the features cartoonish.
Apparently, their “Toonify” website got so much attention on social media, with people flocking to the website to toonify their selfies, that the costs got out of hand and the team had to temporarily turn off the server.
While they’re working on bringing it back to us, let’s take a look at some of the most amusing cartoon transformations down below so that you'll have time to decide whether to go for Elsa from Frozen, or stick to the Nemo makeover.
More info: Toonify.JustinPinkney.com
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Hayao Miyazaki
Chadwick Boseman
Kate Mulgrew
Justin Pinkney, who works as a software consultant at MathWorks in the UK, has been spending most of his time writing code, developing algorithms, training models, and encouraging people to embrace good software development practices.
Just recently, Justin and a fellow deep learning explorer Doron Adler developed a new “Toonify Yourself” system that got the internet buzzing big time. To find out more about their project, Bored Panda spoke to Justin, who said he has been messing around with GANs for quite a while and has trained lots of different models.
Justin said he came up with the idea of modifying networks “using 'layer swapping' to make realistic Ukiyo-e portraits.” He shared some code for this online and Doron Adler tried it out on some of his models, “showing really cool results of these almost real cartoon faces.”
Since then, they have been working together to train some new neural networks and produced the Toonify website.
Tim Allen
Kate Winslet
Gal Gadot
Justin said that although people seem to have a lot of fun seeing what the neural network will turn their face into, they often mention that the results aren’t as good as a human artist could produce. “That's not really surprising, I don't think a human artist could produce 25,000 of these an hour (which we were doing at the peak of traffic),” he explained.
He is now working on making the website come back for free, which he promised will happen super soon. “Server running costs were the biggest challenge. These are big neural networks that are running, and although Google Cloud makes it easy to scale up to lots of traffic, it's still not cheap,” Justin explained.
He also put up a donation page, which you can check out right here, for access to the live site in order to help keep the site running.
Dwayne Johnson
Emma Stone
If the faces weren't next to them I wouldn't have been able to recognize then.
Sonequa Martin-Green
Justin believes that there are lots of possibilities for what AI and deep learning technologies could do, and he thinks people are only just scratching the surface.
“Especially with so much code being open source and GPU resources being so accessible (via Google Collab), it means creators and artists can really easily try this stuff out.”
According to the deep learning explorer, the next steps for GANs are “in giving people more control over the images generated and making them more efficient in terms of training data and computing resources.”
Hiroyuki Sanada
Ryan Gosling
Scarlett Johansson
Tessa Thompson
I these were supposed to be the best examples. I can barely see a resemblance.
Keanu Reeves
Leonardo Dicaprio
Holy mother Mary! :O You better do some corrections on that machine... :/
Johnny Depp
Will Smith
"A Monk With A Book"
Robert Deniro
Barack Obama
Ken Watanabe
Idris Elba
Easy... Men loose their forehads and get bushy eyebrows and women look like Barbie dolls.
The only one I would have guessed without seeing the name is Dwayne "the rock" Johnson. The rest are horrible!
All of the men look like they have a Neanderthal Gene added to their genetic make up.
I kinda want to see trump toonify even tho his skin looks like a hairless cat and his hair is a corn husk.
nope, none of these look anything like the person. Nice try but fail. don't get me wrong, some of these look very good as a stand alone caracter (like the Kate Murgrew one) but as lookalikes, not very
They all have the same "Disney" huge eyes. None of these drawing look like the original human. Don't get the point
Well, I hate to say this but right when it hit Leonardo DiCaprio it got very inaccurate, but other than that these are great!
Some of them are good - like Michelle Yeoh, but mostly very unsimilar face comes out.
What the heck is the app called ? I'm currently sick and on drugs , but I swear I never saw a name in the whole article
It’s basically a program That squeezes your temples closer together. Not impressed.
Shame no one tried it with the Kardashians, or were you to much of a coward?
Does kind of c**p on Asian faces, tbh, and all the women look reasonably identical. But still would be fun to play with.
Easy... Men loose their forehads and get bushy eyebrows and women look like Barbie dolls.
The only one I would have guessed without seeing the name is Dwayne "the rock" Johnson. The rest are horrible!
All of the men look like they have a Neanderthal Gene added to their genetic make up.
I kinda want to see trump toonify even tho his skin looks like a hairless cat and his hair is a corn husk.
nope, none of these look anything like the person. Nice try but fail. don't get me wrong, some of these look very good as a stand alone caracter (like the Kate Murgrew one) but as lookalikes, not very
They all have the same "Disney" huge eyes. None of these drawing look like the original human. Don't get the point
Well, I hate to say this but right when it hit Leonardo DiCaprio it got very inaccurate, but other than that these are great!
Some of them are good - like Michelle Yeoh, but mostly very unsimilar face comes out.
What the heck is the app called ? I'm currently sick and on drugs , but I swear I never saw a name in the whole article
It’s basically a program That squeezes your temples closer together. Not impressed.
Shame no one tried it with the Kardashians, or were you to much of a coward?
Does kind of c**p on Asian faces, tbh, and all the women look reasonably identical. But still would be fun to play with.