Logo Synthesis and Manipulation with Clustered Generative Adversarial Networks

Logo Synthesis and Manipulation with Clustered Generative Adversarial Networks(arxiv.org)

10 points by relate 8 years ago | 8 comments

This looks interesting, but the results are somewhat blurry.

Has anybody ever tried to use features of the logos (number of shapes, shape size, position, color, curvature, shape parents/children, etc.) instead of raw pixel data to train GANs?

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Jack000 8 years ago |

I think logos are a tough problem for convnets because they're not very compositional - ie. they're not made of heirarchically nested parts.

the space of logos is also probably not continuous - eg. there is a logo in the latent space between nike and apple, but it's unlikely to be aesthetic.

posterboy 8 years ago | |

Nipple? Apik? Could be a sportswatch. There might be a few clusters along the path through latent space (if that makes any sense, just skimmed the paper mostly for the figures).

The attempt here seems to be really naive, I agree. But why are logos not compositing? Coat of arms are frequently described in such a manner that would allow to mix them. But then, the traditional artistic combinations of different ones into new are not mere half way morphs. And a classic logo needs to be compositional, because it's easier to perceive (decompose), e.g. hammer and sickle. Scientific Icons are frequently using mathematical patterns and plots, which tickle the eye in quite a different manner. I thought the nike swoosh comes from that rather abstract direction, whereas the apple is quite objective. Both are pictographs, but only the apple is a logo (from logos, ie. speaking).

Jack000 8 years ago | | |

there are logos that are compositional, but most logos are abstractive - eg. the hammer and sickle logo only makes sense because we have prior knowledge of what hammers and sickles look like. You could learn an abstract representation of hammers from a dataset of hammers, but not from a dataset of logos.

I think GANs work best on images with hierarchical composition like human faces.

posterboy 8 years ago |

These are iconographs, in the strict sense, not the full logos. The different google Gs don't really speak for themselves. The Y combinator Y is really not distinctive, either. The first few figures show fav-icons, I'd thought.

relate 8 years ago | |

Hi, I'm one of the authors. That is correct in a strict sense, but we wanted to focus on the more 'creative' part of logos rather than the text. GANs are known to struggle with high resolutions, but we note that we show higher resolution logos later in the paper (see page 12 and 15 e.g) which is trained on the smaller but higher-resolution version of our dataset.

ggggtez 8 years ago |

This title should be changed to "Smudge Synthesis". Move along nothing to see here. Actually the dataset of 600k logos is probably interesting. I bet someone who had some time could do a hugely better job.

posterboy 8 years ago | |

I found interesting the identification of different clusters. Now do some learning over the clusters. Letter cut out from colored shape seems to be the most prominent feature, and the most boring one. But some of the shapes (without cut-outs) are rather interesting. Some of the figures from he article could become icons themselves, reminiscent of scientific plots (cf. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Un...).

The problem is, a logo should be as unique as possible, so mechanical derivatives aren't convincing