Chinese AI system uses deepfake technology to turn drawings into realistic human faces

Deepfakes face stricter regulation in China as the country sees more academic research and commercial use of the technology

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Chinese researchers design AI that generates realistic faces from rough sketches. (Picture: DeepFaceDrawing)

Published: 8:29pm, 19 Jun 2020Updated: 8:29pm, 19 Jun 2020

Can’t draw? Don’t worry. AI can now turn your scribbles into a realistic human face.

DeepFaceDrawing is a new AI system designed to generate realistic images of human faces based on simple or incomplete sketches. Created by a team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and City University of Hong Kong, their research paper proposes that it can be used for anything from character design to criminal investigations.

The DeepFaceDrawing system lets users “with little training in drawing” produce high-quality images. (Picture: DeepFaceDrawing)

Systems like this work by analyzing a massive number of different faces, allowing the program to understand what makes a human face. Researchers say DeepFaceDrawing was trained with pictures of 6,247 men and 11,456 women. Other forms of synthetic media, like the realistic-looking doctored videos known as deepfakes, rely on this approach.

But the content of the database will have an impact on the results. The majority of the images used were either of white or South American faces. And it appears that many celebrities were included, which might explain why the program seems to generate touched-up and glamorous-looking faces.

There have been similar systems before, like Pix2Pix. But the creators of DeepFaceDrawing say their approach is better, because it doesn’t rely on detailed sketches to generate results. They claim that you don’t have to be a professional to use the system: DeepFaceDrawing was trained on 17,000 sketches of varying quality, allowing it to interpret a much wider range of drawings than competing systems.