Overnight there was quite a storm of cartoon characters appearing across Twitter. A new Ncage-style Chrome extension? Nope, it was a website called Toonify Yourself rolled out by developers Justin Pinkney and Doron Adler that uses deep learning to toonify images of faces. As they explain the solution was created after Doron fine-tuned a faces model on a dataset of various characters from animated films. The model picked up key elements of what a cartoon character looks like based on a couple hundred of images. The duo then made a hybrid system using which the structure remained of a cartoon face, but also kept a photo realistic rendering. Justin and Doron then launched https://toonify.justinpinkney.com website through which anyone could upload a picture of themselves to turn into a Disney character!
Cartoon images as inspiration via https:/justinpinkney.com/toonify-yourself/
Unfortunately, just as it went viral the website had to be turned off due to… costs :(
Justin Pinkney commented on his twitter account “Sorry everyone, this is going to have to go offline for now. It got popular and running neural networks in the cloud for thousands of people costs real money it turns out!” Turns out keeping a fairy tale alive isn’t so easy!
So let’s hope they will find a way to bring it back because let’s be honest, who doesn’t love playing around with new technologies??
You can learn more about the process here.
StyleGAN2 blending of humans with cartoons by Doron Adler using @Buntworthy Google Collab notebook to create the blended model