Weakly-supervised Caricature Face Parsing through Domain Adaptation

A caricature is an artistic form of a person's picture in which certain striking characteristics are abstracted or exaggerated in order to create a humor or sarcasm effect. For numerous caricature related applications such as attribute recognition and caricature editing, face parsing is an essential pre-processing step that provides a complete facial structure understanding. However, current state-of-the-art face parsing methods require large amounts of labeled data on the pixel-level and such process for caricature is tedious and labor-intensive. For real photos, there are numerous labeled datasets for face parsing. Thus, we formulate caricature face parsing as a domain adaptation problem, where real photos play the role of the source domain, adapting to the target caricatures. Specifically, we first leverage a spatial transformer based network to enable shape domain shifts. A feed-forward style transfer network is then utilized to capture texture-level domain gaps. With these two steps, we synthesize face caricatures from real photos, and thus we can use parsing ground truths of the original photos to learn the parsing model. Experimental results on the synthetic and real caricatures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaptation algorithm. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsing .Comment: Accepted in ICIP 2019, code and model are available at https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsin

Anticipated synchronization: a metaphorical linear view

We study the regime of anticipated synchronization recently described on a number of dynamical systems including chaotic and noisy ones. We use simple linear caricatures to show the minimal setups able to reproduce the basic facts described.Comment: 7 pages,5 figure

Analyzing Iraqi Political Cartoons

Pictures have an essential effect on our thoughts and decisions.  We have also noticed how these pictures produced in the form of cartoons affect our viewpoints.  They do so since we are addicted to social media to the extent it can manipulate our thoughts unconsciously and obnoxiously. Besides, people don’t have the courage to express their viewpoints clearly, so they tend to use the satire to keep their face.  This motivates the researcher to analyze the underlying structure of this satire presented in caricatures to read the message clearly.  This research aims at revealing the way the political caricatures are produced and the main characteristics of political caricatures.  Incorporating a methodology depending on selecting some samples, this paper is a semiotic analysis of political caricatures announced through the election campaign 2018 in Iraq.  It concentrates on the format caricatures used as a communicative channel on net platform to come up with essential senses and prevailing political matters. This is carried out by adopting Barthes’ semiotic theory which is the first apparent semiotic approach. It is a good means to analyze the implied structure, including the dictionary and implied senses of creating influence of political caricatures. Besides, it provides us with a good means to interpret and understand political caricatures. This is quite important since political cartoons work as an approach to comprehend human consciousness

Library Cartoons: A Literature Review of Library-themed Cartoons, Caricatures, and Comics

To understand differing views of past events, historians, political science scholars, and sociologists have analyzed political and editorial cartoons with themes ranging from elections to fiscal policy to human rights. Yet scant research has been dedicated to cartoons with library themes. The author of this paper examines peer-reviewed literature on the subject of library cartoons, including historical background, analysis of recent themes, and arguments for promoting library-themed cartoons, caricatures, and comics. The author finds a significant gap in the literature on this topic and concludes that information professionals would benefit from a comprehensive content analysis of library-themed cartoons to enhance understanding of the significance of libraries during historic events, assess public perception of libraries, and identify trends over time