Creating Caricature Stickers from Selfies

The Allo messaging capability from Google is now capable of creating caricature image stickers from selfies.  These are mostly for use within Allo, but you can snip them off and use them elsewhere.   Whats most interesting is how this was done, and the care to make it work well and not insult anyone,  even considering things like 'Uncanny Valley' effects.   Which hardly seems important in cartoon images,  since they don't  get close to images you would mistake for photos.

In general the results  are flattering caricatures of the cartoon style.   And you can play with the images to get them to your liking. The article about how this was done is in the Google Research Blog.   Allo is free from Google, so anyone can try.    It links to Google Assistant to make the messaging smart, in ways I am still trying to understand.  More on my examination of Allo.

Caricatures

Nautil on Caricatures.  I remember seeing the MIT Caricature Generator at work during a visit.    I did not think it was very good, compared to human work.  But I liked its premise.  Take a person's image, and figure out how much it was different in certain measurements, from the average human face.  Then exaggerate those dimensions.  An engineers 'definition' of caricature.  A design artist, though, did much better.  Made me think more about the creativity in design, and moved me a bit from my engineers view of expertise.

Charting Global Negotiation Styles

Some charted visual examples of cultural negotiation styles ...

The charts sometimes seem like caricatures, interesting, but I would not bet on them.     They do perhaps at most demonstrate that countries and  cultures are different, sometimes considerably. Good to remember.   They do remind me of a lengthy and detailed Japanese culture course I took. Then in my first serious interaction with Japanese employees, they acted more like American youth culture.  My course had apparently been based on studies of the fathers and mothers of these people.   It's a moving target, consider that too.

Caricatures and Facial Recognition

The brain is a powerful facial recognition machine.   It is only recently we have figured out how to systematize to a degree this kind of analysis using image recognition with computers.   This article shows how caricatures can help us understand this.