ClipArtGAN: An Application of Pix2Pix Generative Adversarial Network for Clip Art Generation

An image can convey a thousand words. This statement emphasizes the importance of illustrating ideas visually rather than writing them down. Although detailed image representation is typically instructive, there are several contexts where simplification of image representations may be more informative. One way to provide an abstract representation of an object is via clip art, which is a simple graphic illustration of an object that can be included in documents or presentations. Clip art representation can be utilized in graphic design for concepts expression and daily life objects illustration. Furthermore, clip art had shown remarkable advantages when compared to real images in terms of editing and manipulation since clip art geometry can be easily edited in addition to the feasibility of storing it in a resolution-independent manner. However, it can be difficult to automatically create clip arts that resemble any object. Here, we propose a novel deep learning model, named ClipArtGAN, that utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to convert a photo of an object to its corresponding clip art. To our knowledge, this is the first GAN model based on Pix2Pix architecture that is capable of automatically generating clip art for any arbitrary object. Three training datasets were collected to train and compare two GAN models based on Pix2Pix and CycleGAN architectures. Our results demonstrate that the mean accuracy obtained using ClipArtGAN utilizing Pix2Pix outperforms that of CycleGAN by 58% and that of Google Images-based search by 54%. These results indicate the efficacy of ClipArtGAN in generating representative clip art images.