Entertainment

This Website Uses AI To Transform Any Picture Into 15th Century Portrait

Published

5 years ago

August 10, 2019

Jack William

Now and with the internet buzzing about viral FaceApp, which uses AI to foretell how anyone will look in future, there’s another service like Faceapp that will transform you into a work of art. If you’ve ever imagined how your picture would look if it were painted by one of the great art masters, this app will show you. AI Portraits uses information from over 45,000 15th century masterwork to help “paint” the portrait of any photo that’s you uploaded.

The service was created and developed by MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab’s Emanuele Del Sozzo, Mauro Martino and Owen Cornec, also by Luca Stornaiuolo from Politecnico di Milano and Liza Gazeeva. The crew focused on 15th-century portraiture as it was a period in art history when realistic depictions of individuals emerged. Interestingly, they point out that portraits of smiling or laughing person were rare, and so support modern users to experiment and see what results occur when uploading these types of pictures.

Lady Gaga. (Photos: Stock Photos from Andrea Raffin/Shutterstock (left) and AI Portraits (right))

While many plenty of apps and filters that doing to make your picture into a work of art, AI Portraits recognize with its GAN models. Several services use style transfers that alter colors but leave the facial lines without touching. AI Portraits actually define the best style for the portrait by analyzing the features and the background. This makes for completely unique 4K portraits done in the style of the Old Masters.

“Portrait masters rarely paint smiling people because smiles and laughter were commonly associated with a more comic aspect of genre painting and because the display of such an overt expression as smiling can seem to distort the face of the sitter,” they write. “This inability of artificial intelligence to reproduce our smiles is teaching us something about the history of art.”

Photos: Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons (left) and AI Portraits (right)

For those people who are interested about the privacy and safety issues that have come up in the FaceApp, the creators of AI Portrait are putting users at ease. “Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits,” states their privacy policy. “We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we’ll immediately delete them.”

AI Portraits is a website that uses artificial intelligence to transform pictures of anyone into a classical 15th-century portrait. So we will show you at what some of today’s biggest celebrities look like.