A Designer Used AI and Photoshop to Revive Ancient Roman Emperors

* Transforming statues into photorealistic faces with AI

Machine learning is a great tool for revamping old photos and videos. So much so that it can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you might imagine walking down the street.

  The portraits are the brainchild of designer Daniel Voshart, who describes the series as a quarantine project that got a little out of hand. Primarily a virtual reality specialist in the film industry, Voshart's work projects were put on hold due to COVID-19, so he began exploring a hobby of his: coloring ancient statues. Looking for suitable material to transform, he began to work through the Roman emperors. It finished its initial renderings of the first 54 emperors in July, but this week, it released updated portraits and new posters for sale.

Buy Voshart told The Verge that he had originally made 300 posters in his first batch, hoping they would sell out in a year. Instead, they left in three weeks, and their work has spread far and wide ever since. "I knew Roman history was popular and there was a built-in audience," says Voshart. "But it was still a bit surprising to see them pick it up the way they did."

To create his portraits, Voshart uses a combination of different software and sources. The main tool is an online program called ArtBreeder, which uses a machine learning method known as a generative adversary network (or GAN) to manipulate portraits and landscapes. If you browse the ArtBreeder site, you can see a variety of faces in different styles, each of which can be adjusted using sliders like a video game character creation screen.

Voshart fed ArtBreeder images of emperors that he collected from statues, coins, and paintings, then manually modified the portraits based on historical descriptions, feeding them back to the GAN. "I'd work in Photoshop, load it into ArtBreeder, tweak it, bring it back to Photoshop, and then rework it," he says. "That resulted in the best photorealistic quality and avoided falling down the path into the haunting valley."

  "WHAT I AM DOING IS AN ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF AN ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION".

  Voshart says his goal was not simply to copy the statues in the flesh, but to create portraits that looked compelling in their own right, each of which takes a day to design. "What I'm doing is an artistic interpretation of an artistic interpretation," he says.

To help, he says that he sometimes fed high-resolution celebrity images into the GAN to increase realism. There is a touch of Daniel Craig in his Augustus, for example, while to create the portrait of Maximinus Thrax he fed images of the wrestler André the Giant. The reason for this, Voshart explains, is that Thrax is believed to have had a pituitary gland disorder in his youth, which gave him a lantern jaw and mountainous structure. André the Giant (real name André René Roussimoff) was diagnosed with the same disorder, so Voshart wanted to borrow the fighter's features to thicken Thrax's jaw and forehead. The process, as he describes it, is almost alchemical, and relies on a careful combination of inputs to create the finished product.

A copy, now available for purchase, of all Voshart's photorealistic Roman Emperors.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, Voshart says that he wasn't really that interested in Roman history before starting this project. However, delving into the lives of the emperors to create their portraits has changed my mind. He had previously discarded the idea of ​​visiting Rome because he thought it was a "tourist trap", but now he says "there are specific museums that I want to visit."

Additionally, his work is already attracting academics, who have praised the portraits for giving the emperors a new depth and realism. Voshart says he talks to a group of history professors and doctors who have given him guidance on certain numbers. Selecting skin tone is an area where there are many disputes, he says, particularly with emperors like Septimius Severus, who is believed to have had Phoenician or perhaps Berber ancestors.

Voshart points out that, in Severus' case, he is the only Roman emperor for whom we have a surviving contemporary painting, the Severan Tondo, which he claims influenced the darker skin tones he used in his representation. "The painting is like, I mean, it depends on who you ask, but I see a dark-skinned North African person," says Voshart. “I am presenting my own type of prejudice from faces that I have known or have known. But that's what I read. "

As a kind of thanks to his advisers, Voshart has even used an image of an assistant professor at USC who looks quite similar to the Numerian emperor to create the portrait of the former ruler. And who knows, maybe this version of Numerian is one that survives through the years. It will be another artistic representation that future historians will debate about.

The main technology behind Artbreeder is its adversarial generative network (GAN). Some call it artificial intelligence, but it is more precisely described as machine learning.

Artistic renditions are by their nature more art than science, but I have made an effort to cross-reference their appearance (hair, eyes, ethnicity, etc.) to historical texts and coins. I have endeavored to age them according to the year of death: its appearance before any serious illness.

My goal was not to romanticize the emperors or make them look heroic. When choosing bust / sculptures, my approach was to favor the bust that was made when the emperor was alive. Otherwise, I preferred the bust made with the highest craftsmanship and where the emperor was stereotypically uglier; my favorite theory is that the artists were probably trying to flatter their subjects.

Some emperors (late dynasties, short reigns) had no surviving busts. For this, I investigated multiple representations of coins, family trees, and places of birth. Sometimes I created my own compounds.

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