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New AI Program Purports to Let Even Beginners Make High-Quality Anime Character Portraits

Researchers at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) and Waseda University announced on Thursday the results of their new AI-powered project, AniFaceDrawing. This program aims to assist even those with no artistic talent to create high-quality anime character portraits.

According to the researchers, teaching an AI to draw in an anime-like style is far from simple. To quote the official press release:

“Creating a professional anime portrait with artificial intelligence assistance is challenging due to the unique characteristics and abstract nature of the anime art style. Input sketches made by general users during the drawing process often lack detail and shape information, adding to the complexity. To tackle this challenge, researchers from Japan have developed a novel high-quality anime portrait drawing assistance system—AniFaceDrawing—which enables even beginners to create anime drawings of professional standards.”

Using the program is rather straightforward. You draw in the leftmost panel on the screen. After each stroke, the AI extrapolates the rest of the character line art in the other two panels in varying amounts of detail. One of the AI panels (of your choice) is then placed below the leftmost panel. If you like what the AI has made, you can simply trace it.

On the other hand, if you don't like the shape of the eyes, mouth, hair, etc., you can re-draw those bits, and the AI will update its guess. Once you have AI-assisted line art you are happy with, you then select a reference photo—which the AI will use as a template for colors, shading, and additional details.

While AniFaceDrawing no doubt creates pictures on a level far beyond what a total art dunce like myself could produce, claiming the results reach “professional standards” is more than a bit optimistic, in my opinion. Things like the placement of facial features in relation to one another and general asymmetry in the eyes/eyebrows are reoccurring problems. Moreover, the program seems to have issues with deciding what is clothing, what is skin, and what is hair once outside the general facial area.

All in all, it's an interesting research project that, if anything, shows just how skilled actual human artists really are.

Source: Waseda University