Hey guys! We have decided to set up this blog to give a little bit more insight into the development, infrastructure, and progress of Selfie2Anime.com. We’ll be tackling the relevant topics from a more technical perspective, so if you’re into this kind of stuff like we are, be sure to let us know on Twitter @RicoBeti and @nathangloverAUS or in the comments down below and keep checking this blog every once in a while for more updates! 
Introducing: Selfie2Anime
Selfie2Anime.com is a free webservice that lets you upload a picture of yourself and in generates an anime-style character which is based on your selfie. The technology behind the conversion function is called a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN for short. GANs are a relatively new concept in machine-learning that has invented in 2014. The specific GAN we are using for Selfie2Anime is derived from the excellent work by Junho Kim, Minjae Kim, Hyeonwoo Kang, and Kwanghee Lee, which they have made accessible on Github, along with sample data and pre-trained models. Their research paper is available online as well. 
We have set up both the front-end and the back-end of this website a week ago on Friday 16th, 2019. In the same spirit of the researches mentioned above, we have open-sourced Selfie2Anime on Github as well, including the back-end service and this blog.
First Results are In
Below are a few examples that have been generated based on selfies submitted by some of our early users. We’ve been positively surprised by how well this technology performs. Although, of course, not everything goes well all the time (or even most of the time, to be honest 
), and there are some — rather unfortunate — “creations” generated by the GAN. We’ll address some obvious shortcomings in future posts. For now, here’s what’s possible on the happy-path:
For privacy reasons, of course, we cannot and will not share the original selfies of the beautiful people that have been a part of this journey thus far. However, we are actively seeking people that would give us permission to share their anime-selfies along with their original photos.
Stay put for more technical posts coming up on this blog shortly and leave your thoughts, feedback and suggestions in the comments down below.
