# DeepPortraitDrawing: Generating Human Body Images from Freehand Sketches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [VITON: An Image-based Virtual Try-on Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08447/) (2017)
- [Pose Guided Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09368/) (2017)
- [Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09405/) (2017)
- [Toward Characteristic-Preserving Image-based Virtual Try-On Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07688/) (2018)
- [Deformable GANs for Pose-based Human Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00055/) (2017)
- [Liquid Warping GAN: A Unified Framework for Human Motion Imitation, Appearance Transfer and Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12224/) (2019)
- [Controllable Person Image Synthesis with Attribute-Decomposed GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12267/) (2020)
- [Instance-level Human Parsing via Part Grouping Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00157/) (2018)
- [Dense Intrinsic Appearance Flow for Human Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11326/) (2019)
- [Deep Image Spatial Transformation for Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00696/) (2020)
- [Disentangled Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02621/) (2017)
- [Synthesizing Images of Humans in Unseen Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07739/) (2018)
- [Dense Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01995/) (2018)
- [SketchyGAN: Towards Diverse and Realistic Sketch to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02753/) (2018)
- [Scribbler: Controlling Deep Image Synthesis with Sketch and Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00835/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [IMAGGarment: Fine-Grained Garment Generation for Controllable Fashion Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13176/) (2025)
- [DiffSketching: Sketch Control Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18812/) (2023)
- [A Two-stage Personalized Virtual Try-on Framework with Shape Control and Texture Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15480/) (2023)
- [Sketch2Human: Deep Human Generation with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15889/) (2024)
- [FashionEngine: Interactive 3D Human Generation and Editing via Multimodal Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01655/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Researchers have explored various ways to generate realistic images from freehand sketches, e.g., for objects and human faces. However, how to generate realistic human body images from sketches is still a challenging problem. It is, first because of the sensitivity to human shapes, second because of the complexity of human images caused by body shape and pose changes, and third because of the domain gap between realistic images and freehand sketches. In this work, we present DeepPortraitDrawing, a deep generative framework for converting roughly drawn sketches to realistic human body images. To encode complicated body shapes under various poses, we take a local-to-global approach. Locally, we employ semantic part auto-encoders to construct part-level shape spaces, which are useful for refining the geometry of an input pre-segmented hand-drawn sketch. Globally, we employ a cascaded spatial transformer network to refine the structure of body parts by adjusting their spatial locations and relative proportions. Finally, we use a global synthesis network for the sketch-to-image translation task, and a face refinement network to enhance facial details. Extensive experiments have shown that given roughly sketched human portraits, our method produces more realistic images than the state-of-the-art sketch-to-image synthesis techniques.