Two researchers in Poland have used neural algorithms to transform photographs into the style of cartoon drawings. Maciej Pesko and Tomasz Trzcinski at Warsaw University of Technology used several different state-of-the-art “style transfer” and “instance normalization” algorithms to convert a selection of photographs into ten different illustrative styles – including a Spider Man comic, Mickey Mouse cartoon and the iconic Japanese print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Pesko told me that their work has several aims including generating images in painting styles of famous artists; rendering similar textures in computer games; changing image scenery (from day to night, for example); and face swapping.
They describe their technique in a preprint on arXiv and they have set-up a website for “comixifying”. The above comixified image was created from a photo of a jumping horse and rider and there are many more examples in the preprint.
Basking sharks are famous for basking, so it is rather surprising to discover that they are also pretty good at jumping. How high can they reach above the sea? Emmett Johnston at Queen’s University, Belfast have done the physics. Check out “Latent power of basking sharks revealed by exceptional breaching events” for the answer.
