# DeepFacePencil: Creating Face Images from Freehand Sketches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.13343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [FENeRF: Face Editing in Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15490/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Open Domain Adaptation for Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05703/) (2021)
- [DrawingInStyles: Portrait Image Generation and Editing with Spatially Conditioned StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02762/) (2022)
- [DiffSketching: Sketch Control Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18812/) (2023)
- [dualFace:Two-Stage Drawing Guidance for Freehand Portrait Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12297/) (2021)
- [AniFaceDrawing: Anime Portrait Exploration during Your Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07476/) (2023)
- [DeepPortraitDrawing: Generating Human Body Images from Freehand Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02070/) (2022)
- [IDE-3D: Interactive Disentangled Editing for High-Resolution 3D-aware Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15517/) (2022)
- [S2TD-Face: Reconstruct a Detailed 3D Face with Controllable Texture from a Single Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01218/) (2024)
- [Fighting Malicious Media Data: A Survey on Tampering Detection and Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05667/) (2022)
- [Make Your Brief Stroke Real and Stereoscopic: 3D-Aware Simplified Sketch to Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06857/) (2023)
- [Inversion-by-Inversion: Exemplar-based Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis via Stochastic Differential Equations without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07665/) (2023)
- [High-Quality Medical Image Generation from Free-hand Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00353/) (2024)
- [U-Sketch: An Efficient Approach for Sketch to Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18425/) (2024)
- [Sketch2Human: Deep Human Generation with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15889/) (2024)
- [Face sketch to photo translation using generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12290/) (2021)
- [Semantics-Preserving Sketch Embedding for Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13015/) (2022)
- [Sketch-1-to-3: One Single Sketch to 3D Detailed Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17852/) (2025)
- [SketchFaceGS: Real-Time Sketch-Driven Face Editing and Generation with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19202/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we explore the task of generating photo-realistic face images from hand-drawn sketches. Existing image-to-image translation methods require a large-scale dataset of paired sketches and images for supervision. They typically utilize synthesized edge maps of face images as training data. However, these synthesized edge maps strictly align with the edges of the corresponding face images, which limit their generalization ability to real hand-drawn sketches with vast stroke diversity. To address this problem, we propose DeepFacePencil, an effective tool that is able to generate photo-realistic face images from hand-drawn sketches, based on a novel dual generator image translation network during training. A novel spatial attention pooling (SAP) is designed to adaptively handle stroke distortions which are spatially varying to support various stroke styles and different levels of details. We conduct extensive experiments and the results demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing methods on both image quality and model generalization to hand-drawn sketches.