A descriptive approach for automatic generation of visual blends is presented. The implemented system, the Blender, is composed of two components: the Mapper and the Visual Blender. The approach uses structured visual representations along with sets of visual relations which describe how the elements (in which the visual representation can be decomposed) relate among each other. Our system is a hybrid blender, as the blending process starts at the Mapper (conceptual level) and ends at the Visual Blender (visual representation level). The experimental results show that the Blender is able to create analogies from input mental spaces and produce well-composed blends, which follow the rules imposed by its base-analogy and its relations. The resulting blends are visually interesting and some can be considered as unexpected.
Xiao and Linkola proposed Vismantic, a semi-automatic system aimed at producing visual compositions to express specific meanings, namely the ones of abstract concepts. Their system is based on three binary image operations (juxtaposition, replacement and fusion), which are the basic operations to represent visual metaphors @cite_10 . For example, Vismantic represents the slogan as an image of an electric light bulb where the wire filament and screw base are fused with an image of green leaves. The selection of images as well as the application of the visual operations require user's intervention.
@cite_10
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This paper motivates the use of computational argumentation for evaluating ‘concept blends’ and other forms of combinatorial creativity. We exemplify our approach in the domain of computer icon design, where icons are understood as creative artefacts generated through concept blending. We present a semiotic system for representing icons, showing how they can be described in terms of interpretations and how they are related by sign patterns. The interpretation of a sign pattern conveys an intended meaning for an icon. This intended meaning is subjective, and depends on the way concept blending for creating the icon is realised. We show how the intended meaning of icons can be discussed in an explicit and social argumentation process modeled as a dialogue game, and show examples of these following the style of Lakatos (1976). In this way, we are able to evaluate concept blends through an open-ended and dynamic discussion in which concept blends can be improved and the reasons behind a specific evaluation are made explicit. In the closing section, we explore argumentation and the potential roles that can play at different stages of the concept blending process. Automatic image synthesis research has been rapidly growing with deep networks getting more and more expressive. In the last couple of years, we have observed images of digits, indoor scenes, birds, chairs, etc. being automatically generated. The expressive power of image generators have also been enhanced by introducing several forms of conditioning variables such as object names, sentences, bounding box and key-point locations. In this work, we propose a novel deep conditional generative adversarial network architecture that takes its strength from the semantic layout and scene attributes integrated as conditioning variables. We show that our architecture is able to generate realistic outdoor scene images under different conditions, e.g. day-night, sunny-foggy, with clear object boundaries. The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts. This paper describes our initial work in developing a real-time audio-visual Chinese speech synthesizer with a 3D expressive avatar. The avatar model is parameterized according to the MPEG-4 facial animation standard [1]. This standard offers a compact set of facial animation parameters (FAPs) and feature points (FPs) to enable realization of 20 Chinese visemes and 7 facial expressions (i.e. 27 target facial configurations). The Xface [2] open source toolkit enables us to define the influence zone for each FP and the deformation function that relates them. Hence we can easily animate a large number of coordinates in the 3D model by specifying values for a small set of FAPs and their FPs. FAP values for 27 target facial configurations were estimated from available corpora. We extended the dominance blending approach to effect animations for coarticulated visemes superposed with expression changes. We selected six sentiment-carrying text messages and synthesized expressive visual speech (for all expressions, in randomized order) with neutral audio speech. A perceptual experiment involving 11 subjects shows that they can identify the facial expression that matches the text message’s sentiment 85 of the time.