iCartoonFace: A Benchmark of Cartoon Person Recognition

Cartoons receive increasingly attention and have a huge global market. Cartoon person recognition has a wealth of application scenarios. However, there is no large and high quality dataset for cartoon person recognition. It limit the development of recognition algorithms. In this paper, we propose the first large unconstrained cartoon database called iCartoonFace. We have released the dataset publicly available to promote cartoon person recognition research\footnote{The dataset can be applied by sending email to zhengyi01@qiyi.com}. The dataset contains 68,312 images of 2,639 identities. The dataset consists of persons which come from cartoon videos. The samples are extracted from public available images on website and online videos on iQiYi company. All images pass through a careful manual annotation process. We evaluated the state-of-the-art image classification and face recognition algorithms on the iCartoonFace dataset as a baseline. A dataset fusion method which utilize face feature to improve the performance of cartoon recognition task is proposed. Experimental performance show that the performance of baseline models much worse than human performance. The proposed dataset fusion method achieves a 4.74% improvement over the baseline model. In a word, state-of-the-art algorithms for classification and recognition are far from being perfect for unconstrained cartoon person recognition.