This AI turns you into an anime character, has science gone too far?

We live in an era of both miracles and horrible things. Artificial intelligence today has the ability to create fake videos that describe people who are doing or saying things they have never said or done, applying pressure on your face, and turning you into a classic painting work.

But it didn’t stop there. Thanks to researchers at NCSoft, AI can now turn your face into a convincing anime character.

This program uses a fairly common machine learning architecture as “Anti-generated Network” (GANs). GANs “learn” through an enormous amount of data entered, such as images of human and animal faces, thereby creating new patterns.

The AI ​​anime creation program we are talking about here is the work of Junho Kim, Minjae Kim, Hyeonwoo Kang, and Kwanghee Lee – both researchers are working at NCSoft game company, publisher Guild Wars game 2. This NCSoft research team has released the program source code to GitHub and posted research results online.

In an email, Kim said: ” I was inspired by a study called ‘class activation mapping’ (CAM) “. CAM is an algorithm that looks at an image, then splits it into large numbers, using discrete points to classify the most important elements. For example, if a city network is trained by the CAM algorithm looking at the image of a dog and a cat, it will see the fur as a trait that is too similar between two animals, cannot be used as classification characteristics, instead use the eyes or ears of two animals to distinguish them.

According to research results, the NCSoft team embedded those “attention maps” into their models, allowing GAN to focus on important areas in the images and ignore less important areas. In addition to a normalization algorithm that the group named Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization (AdaLIN), they created an effective way to create an anime portrait from your selfie image.

Kim and his group don’t just stop turning people into anime characters. By the same technology, researchers could turn ordinary horses into zebras, often into VanGogh style drawings, and even turn cats into … dogs. Applying this transformation technology to animals really produces good results that make viewers not understand what is going on.

If you have a computer strong enough to run the software (which you certainly don’t have), you can turn your dog into a cat, or yourself into a perfect anime character.

Reference: Vice