Halloween is a celebration that is celebrated in many countries every October 31. With the day fast approaching, there is an AI that can spook things up a bit.
Developer Jose Brown Kramer created an AI system that can stylize users, transforming their faces into rotting corpses. To build the system, Kramer first transfer-learning a StyleGAN2 zombie generator.
He then tweaked it to develop a hybrid model comprised of earlier layers from a human generator and later ones from the zombie generator.
In a post on Reddit, Kramer said that:
Kramer then created a website just for it.
There, users can simply upload an image of themselves, hit that 'Make Me A Zombie!' button, and give the AI a few moment to literally transform the faces inside the uploaded image into terrifying faces of zombies.
Kramer developed the AI independently from the Toonify model, but coincidentally landed on the same same technology stack.
He said that there are two minor differences in the approaches:
First, he augmented the input data by "crappifying" it. This purposefully introduced resizing and compression artifacts. Second, Kramer emphasizes shapes and orientation of the original image, but using the texture of the zombie image. Toonification is the opposite.
The zombie dataset Kramer used, consisted of about 300 images of zombie Halloween masks and people in zombie makeup.
"It comes mostly from Pinterest and Google, and was hand filtered to throw out non-zombies," he said.
It should be noted that the AI can only zombify faces and not the body.
So if users upload a photo of someone from the waist up, the site will crop the image to just focus only on the face.
What's more, the AI can only work with one face at a time. What this means, if users upload a photo of a group of people, the AI will only detect the most prominent face, and crop out the rest.
However, if the AI detects any other body part that is near the face it wants to zombify, that body part hand will also be transformed into bloody flesh.
For example, if a person has his/her hand touching his/her face. Because removing the hand means editing the image, a feat the AI cannot do, the AI will not crop the hand and instead will zombify it as well.
And also, the AI can work for cartoons too. But only if the face of the character resembles that of a human, since the AI was trained to detect human faces only.
For best results, users can try uploading high resolutions photos of themselves, in proper and good lighting conditions.
Users' face should also take up a larger portion of the image, and should also be facing straight towards the camera.
For those who concern privacy, the website said that it only use images users have uploaded to make zombie pictures, and are never stored on its servers.
"So once your zombie is made, we have no record of your image. The only other data we collect is standard Google Analytics for counting page views and the like," explained the site.