Towards automated caricature recognition

This paper addresses the problem of identifying a subject from a caricature. A caricature is a facial sketch of a subject's face that exaggerates identifiable facial features beyond realism, while still conveying his identity. To enable this task, we propose a set of qualitative facial features that encodes the appearance of both caricatures and photographs. We utilized crowdsourcing, through Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, to assist in the labeling of the qualitative features. Using these features, we combine logistic regression, multiple kernel learning, and support vector machines to generate a similarity score between a caricature and a facial photograph. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 196 pairs of caricatures and photographs, which we have made publicly available. Through the development of novel feature representations and matching algorithms, this research seeks to help leverage the ability of humans to recognize caricatures to improve automatic face recognition methods.