  Recovering a photorealistic face from an artistic portrait is a challenging
task since crucial facial details are often distorted or completely lost in
artistic compositions. To handle this loss, we propose an Attribute-guided Face
Recovery from Portraits (AFRP) that utilizes a Face Recovery Network (FRN) and
a Discriminative Network (DN). FRN consists of an autoencoder with residual
block-embedded skip-connections and incorporates facial attribute vectors into
the feature maps of input portraits at the bottleneck of the autoencoder. DN
has multiple convolutional and fully-connected layers, and its role is to
enforce FRN to generate authentic face images with corresponding facial
attributes dictated by the input attribute vectors. %Leveraging on the spatial
transformer networks, FRN automatically compensates for misalignments of
portraits. % and generates aligned face images. For the preservation of
identities, we impose the recovered and ground-truth faces to share similar
visual features. Specifically, DN determines whether the recovered image looks
like a real face and checks if the facial attributes extracted from the
recovered image are consistent with given attributes. %Our method can recover
high-quality photorealistic faces from unaligned portraits while preserving the
identity of the face images as well as it can reconstruct a photorealistic face
image with a desired set of attributes. Our method can recover photorealistic
identity-preserving faces with desired attributes from unseen stylized
portraits, artistic paintings, and hand-drawn sketches. On large-scale
synthesized and sketch datasets, we demonstrate that our face recovery method
achieves state-of-the-art results.
