  Caricature is an artistic drawing created to abstract or exaggerate facial
features of a person. Rendering visually pleasing caricatures is a difficult
task that requires professional skills, and thus it is of great interest to
design a method to automatically generate such drawings. To deal with large
shape changes, we propose an algorithm based on a semantic shape transform to
produce diverse and plausible shape exaggerations. Specifically, we predict
pixel-wise semantic correspondences and perform image warping on the input
photo to achieve dense shape transformation. We show that the proposed
framework is able to render visually pleasing shape exaggerations while
maintaining their facial structures. In addition, our model allows users to
manipulate the shape via the semantic map. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
our approach on a large photograph-caricature benchmark dataset with
comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods.
