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Character customization system is an important component in Role-Playing Games (RPGs), where players are allowed to edit the facial appearance of their in-game characters with their own preferences rather than using default templates. This paper proposes a method for automatically creating in-game characters of players according to an input face photo. We formulate the above "artistic creation" process under a facial similarity measurement and parameter searching paradigm by solving an optimization problem over a large set of physically meaningful facial parameters. To effectively minimize the distance between the created face and the real one, two loss functions, i.e. a "discriminative loss" and a "facial content loss", are specifically designed. As the rendering process of a game engine is not differentiable, a generative network is further introduced as an "imitator" to imitate the physical behavior of the game engine so that the proposed method can be implemented under a neural style transfer framework and the parameters can be optimized by gradient descent. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a high degree of generation similarity between the input face photo and the created in-game character in terms of both global appearance and local details. Our method has been deployed in a new game last year and has now been used by players over 1 million times.

Raft-culture is a way of utilizing water for farming aquatic product. Automatic raft-culture monitoring by remote sensing technique is an important way to control the crop's growth and implement effective management. This paper presents an automatic pixel-wise raft labeling method based on fully convolutional network (FCN). As rafts are always tiny and neatly arranged in images, traditional FCN method fails to extract the clear boundary and other detailed information. Therefore, a homogeneous convolutional neural network (HCN) is designed, which only consists of convolutions and activations to retain all details. We further design a dual-scale structure (DS-HCN) to integrate higher-level contextual information for accomplishing sea-land segmentation and raft labeling at the same time in a uniform framework. A dataset with Gaofen-1 satellite images was collected to verify the effectiveness of our method. DS-HCN shows a satisfactory performance with a better interpretability and a more accurate labeling result.

With the rapid development of Role-Playing Games (RPGs), players are now allowed to edit the facial appearance of their in-game characters with their preferences rather than using default templates. This paper proposes a game character auto-creation framework that generates in-game characters according to a player's input face photo. Different from the previous methods that are designed based on neural style transfer or monocular 3D face reconstruction, we re-formulate the character auto-creation process in a different point of view: by predicting a large set of physically meaningful facial parameters under a self-supervised learning paradigm. Instead of updating facial parameters iteratively at the input end of the renderer as suggested by previous methods, which are time-consuming, we introduce a facial parameter translator so that the creation can be done efficiently through a single forward propagation from the face embeddings to parameters, with a considerable 1000x computational speedup. Despite its high efficiency, the interactivity is preserved in our method where users are allowed to optionally fine-tune the facial parameters on our creation according to their needs. Our approach also shows better robustness than previous methods, especially for those photos with head-pose variance. Comparison results and ablation analysis on seven public face verification datasets suggest the effectiveness of our method.

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