(Un)predictability in Verbal-Visual Interactions of English and French Caricatures Translated in the Greek Press

This article investigates the political caricatures assembly of some major ‘players' on the contemporary economic-political EU stage, and the semiotic-linguistic and visual rhetorical tools used to achieve this assembly. This is achieved through an intersemiotic analysis of the aspects of a small corpus of political caricatures in English and French newspapers that were republished in Greek newspapers in the aftermath of Greece's first memorandum in 2010 and within the ongoing discussion about the(un)predictability of Grexit terror. A rationale for the combination of intersemiotic and interlingual analysis and a discussion of the nature and functions of the semiotic complexity of political caricatures are provided. The analysis, drawing upon the notions of intersemiosis and(un)predictability in translation, addresses the verbal and visual aspects of the caricatures against a cross-cultural background. The analysis of four caricatures elaborates on intersemiotic aspects of the sample, specifically on verbal-visual interactions as these are juxtaposed on both the source and target culture, toward an understanding of the messages of the caricatures, the tools used to convey these messages and how they contribute to the ongoing discussion about the(un)predictable roles of Greece in/outside Europe.

Caricature Exhibition Held in Cairo on Ancient Chinese Philosopher Laozi

A caricature exhibition on Chinese philosopher Laozi was held in Cairo on July 8, helping promote Chinese culture in Egypt and boost mutual cultural exchanges. The exhibition displayed more than 30 works by 40 artists from 18 countries including China, Egypt, Spain, and Brazil. These paintings reflect the admiration and love of people from arround the world for Laozi’s philosophy.

Frontal and Semi-Frontal Facial Caricature Synthesis Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

In this paper,we present a novel approach to synthesizing frontal and semi-frontal cartoon-like facial caricatures from an image.The caricature is generated by warping the input face from the original feature points to the corresponding exaggerated feature points.A 3D mean face model is incorporated to facilitate face to caricatures by inferring the depth of 3D feature points and the spatial transformation.Then the 3D face is deformed by using non-negative matrix factorization and projected back to image plane for future warping.To efficiently solve the nonlinear spatial transformation,we propose a novel initialization scheme to set up Levenberg-Marquardt optimization.According to the spatial transformation,exaggeration is applied to the most salient features by exaggerating their normalized difference from the mean.Non-photorealistic rendering（NPR） based stylization completes the cartoon caricature.Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of view angles and aesthetic visual quality.

Portrait drawing from corresponding range and intensity images

We propose a real-time rendering system for automatically creating a caricature drawing, i.e., an exaggerated portrait, of a human face, based on simultaneous use of a range image (or 3D mesh) and a registered photograph of the same face. Combining these information sources provides complementary information. Significant geometric lines such as occluding contours and suggestive contours are extracted from the range data, while textured areas corresponding to shading features are extracted from the photograph. These are combined, and then distorted to produce the final caricature. The final output may be produced using a choice of non-photorealistic rendering styles. Our system method works well for low resolution range images; for these it is fast enough to allow the viewpoint to be chosen in real time. The final output combines significant lines, textured areas, and optional shading, giving a pleasing result which preserves not only the shape cues of the geometric description, but also other essential visual characteristics of the facial image that cannot be deduced from geometry alone.

Manifold Constrained Transfer of Facial Geometric Knowledge for 3D Caricature Reconstruction

3D caricatures are important attractive elements of the interface in virtual environment such as online game. However, very limited 3D caricatures exist in the real world. Meanwhile, creating 3D caricatures manually is rather costly, and even professional skills are needed. This paper proposes a novel and effective manifold transfer algorithm to reconstruct 3D caricatures according to their original 2D caricatures. We first manually create a small dataset with only 100 3D caricature models and use them to initialize the whole 3D dataset. After that, manifold transfer algorithm is carried out to refine the dataset. The algorithm comprises of two steps. The first is to perform manifold alignment between 2D and 3D caricatures to get a ＂standard＂ manifold map; the second is to reconstruct all the 3D caricatures based on the manifold map. The proposed approach utilizes and transfers knowledge of 2D caricatures to the target 3D caricatures well. Comparative experiments show that the approach reconstructs 3D caricatures more effectively and the results conform more to the styles of the original 2D caricatures than the Principal Components Analysis （PCA） based method.