Human Machine Co-Creation. A Complementary Cognitive Approach to Creative Character Design Process Using GANs

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks GANs applications continue to attract the attention of researchers in different fields. In such a framework, two neural networks compete adversely to generate new visual contents indistinguishable from the original dataset. The objective of this research is to create a complementary codesign process between humans and machines to augment character designers abilities in visualizing and creating new characters for multimedia projects such as games and animation. Driven by design cognitive scaffolding, the proposed approach aims to inform the process of perceiving, knowing, and making. The machine generated concepts are used as a launching platform for character designers to conceptualize new characters. A labelled dataset of 22,000 characters was developed for this work and deployed using different GANs to evaluate the most suited for the context, followed by mixed methods evaluation for the machine output and human derivations. The discussed results substantiate the value of the proposed cocreation framework and elucidate how the generated concepts are used as cognitive substances that interact with designers competencies in a versatile manner to influence the creative processes of conceptualizing novel characters.

Lightweight Attribute Localizing Models for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) deals with the problem of identifying features in a pedestrian image. It has found interesting applications in person retrieval, suspect re-identification and soft biometrics. In the past few years, several Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been designed to solve the task; however, the developed DNNs predominantly suffer from over-parameterization and high computational complexity. These problems hinder them from being exploited in resource-constrained embedded devices with limited memory and computational capacity. By reducing a network's layers using effective compression techniques, such as tensor decomposition, neural network compression is an effective method to tackle these problems. We propose novel Lightweight Attribute Localizing Models (LWALM) for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR). LWALM is a compressed neural network obtained after effective layer-wise compression of the Attribute Localization Model (ALM) using the Canonical Polyadic Decomposition with Error Preserving Correction (CPD-EPC) algorithm.