Matching Faces and Attributes Between the Artistic and the Real Domain: the PersonArt Approach

In this article, we present an approach for retrieving similar faces between the artistic and the real domain. The application we refer to is an interactive exhibition inside a museum, in which a visitor can take a photo of himself and search for a lookalike in the collection of paintings. The task requires not only to identify faces but also to extract discriminative features from artistic and photo-realistic images, tackling a significant domain shift. Our method integrates feature extraction networks which account for the aesthetic similarity of two faces and their correspondences in terms of semantic attributes. Also, it addresses the domain shift between realistic images and paintings by translating photo-realistic images into the artistic domain. Noticeably, by exploiting the same technique, our model does not need to rely on annotated data in the artistic domain. Experimental results are conducted on different paired datasets to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of identity and attribute preservation. The approach is also evaluated on unpaired settings and in combination with an interactive relevance feedback strategy. Finally, we show how the proposed algorithm has been implemented in a real showcase at the Gallerie Estensi museum in Italy, with the participation of more than 1,100 visitors in just three days.