Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

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Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

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High Resolution Face Age Editing

Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier

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Auto-TLDR; An Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Face Age editing on High Resolution Images

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Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

Mask-Based Style-Controlled Image Synthesis Using a Mask Style Encoder

Jaehyeong Cho, Wataru Shimoda, Keiji Yanai

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Auto-TLDR; Style-controlled Image Synthesis from Semantic Segmentation masks using GANs

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In recent years, the advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for image generation and translation tasks. In particular, the image-to-image translation is a method of learning mapping from a source domain to a target domain and synthesizing an image. Image-to-image translation can be applied to a variety of tasks, making it possible to quickly and easily synthesize realistic images from semantic segmentation masks. However, in the existing image-to-image translation method, there is a limitation on controlling the style of the translated image, and it is not easy to synthesize an image by controlling the style of each mask element in detail. Therefore, we propose an image synthesis method that controls the style of each element by improving the existing image-to-image translation method. In the proposed method, we implement a style encoder that extracts style features for each mask element. The extracted style features are concatenated to the semantic mask in the normalization layer, and used the style-controlled image synthesis of each mask element. In experiments, we train style-controlled images synthesis using the datasets consisting of semantic segmentation masks and real images. The results show that the proposed method has excellent performance for style-controlled images synthesis for each element.

Pixel-based Facial Expression Synthesis

Arbish Akram, Nazar Khan

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Auto-TLDR; pixel-based facial expression synthesis using GANs

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Recently, Facial expression synthesis has shown remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, these GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the target data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GANs results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method. Recent work has shown that facial expression synthesis changes only local regions of faces. In the proposed method, each output pixel observes only one input pixel. The proposed method achieves generalization capability by leveraging only few hundred images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs comparably with the recent GANs on in-dataset images and significantly outperforms on in the wild images. In addition, the proposed method is faster and it also achieves significantly better performance with two orders of magnitudes lesser computational and storage cost as compared to state-of-the-art GAN-based methods.

Semantic-Guided Inpainting Network for Complex Urban Scenes Manipulation

Pierfrancesco Ardino, Yahui Liu, Elisa Ricci, Bruno Lepri, Marco De Nadai

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Auto-TLDR; Semantic-Guided Inpainting of Complex Urban Scene Using Semantic Segmentation and Generation

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Manipulating images of complex scenes to reconstruct, insert and/or remove specific object instances is a challenging task. Complex scenes contain multiple semantics and objects, which are frequently cluttered or ambiguous, thus hampering the performance of inpainting models. Conventional techniques often rely on structural information such as object contours in multi-stage approaches that generate unreliable results and boundaries. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning model to alter a complex urban scene by removing a user-specified portion of the image and coherently inserting a new object (e.g. car or pedestrian) in that scene. Inspired by recent works on image inpainting, our proposed method leverages the semantic segmentation to model the content and structure of the image, and learn the best shape and location of the object to insert. To generate reliable results, we design a new decoder block that combines the semantic segmentation and generation task to guide better the generation of new objects and scenes, which have to be semantically consistent with the image. Our experiments, conducted on two large-scale datasets of urban scenes (Cityscapes and Indian Driving), show that our proposed approach successfully address the problem of semantically-guided inpainting of complex urban scene.

Image Inpainting with Contrastive Relation Network

Xiaoqiang Zhou, Junjie Li, Zilei Wang, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

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Auto-TLDR; Two-Stage Inpainting with Graph-based Relation Network

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Image inpainting faces the challenging issue of the requirements on structure reasonableness and texture coherence. In this paper, we propose a two-stage inpainting framework to address this issue. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate stages. Completed segmentation of the corrupted image is firstly predicted through segmentation reconstruction network, while fine-grained image details are restored in the second stage through an image generator. The two stages are connected in series as the image details are generated under the guidance of completed segmentation map that predicted in the first stage. Specifically, in the second stage, we propose a novel graph-based relation network to model the relationship existed in corrupted image. In relation network, both intra-relationship for pixels in the same semantic region and inter-relationship between different semantic parts are considered, improving the consistency and compatibility of image textures. Besides, contrastive loss is designed to facilitate the relation network training. Such a framework not only simplifies the inpainting problem directly, but also exploits the relationship in corrupted image explicitly. Extensive experiments on various public datasets quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art.

Galaxy Image Translation with Semi-Supervised Noise-Reconstructed Generative Adversarial Networks

Qiufan Lin, Dominique Fouchez, Jérôme Pasquet

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks Using Paired and Unpaired Images

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Image-to-image translation with Deep Learning neural networks, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), is one of the most powerful methods for simulating astronomical images. However, current work is limited to utilizing paired images with supervised translation, and there has been rare discussion on reconstructing noise background that encodes instrumental and observational effects. These limitations might be harmful for subsequent scientific applications in astrophysics. Therefore, we aim to develop methods for using unpaired images and preserving noise characteristics in image translation. In this work, we propose a two-way image translation model using GANs that exploits both paired and unpaired images in a semi-supervised manner, and introduce a noise emulating module that is able to learn and reconstruct noise characterized by high-frequency features. By experimenting on multi-band galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHT), we show that our method recovers global and local properties effectively and outperforms benchmark image translation models. To our best knowledge, this work is the first attempt to apply semi-supervised methods and noise reconstruction techniques in astrophysical studies.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

Xin Ma, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang, Zhenhua Chai, Xiaolin Wei, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Siamese inference for image inpainting

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Most deep learning based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to fill missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, in the image inpainting task, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) forming complex patterns. It is difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. Moreover, the restored image usually can not be harmoniously integrated into the exiting content, especially in the boundary area. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Attention Fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smoother way and be inserted into decoder layers in a plug-and-play way. DAF is developed to not only adaptively rescale channel-wise features by taking interdependencies between channels into account but also force deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing more on unknown regions. In this way, the unknown region will be naturally filled from the outside to the inside. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple datasets, including facial and natural datasets (i.e., Celeb-HQ, Pairs Street View, Places2 and ImageNet), demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms against state-of-the-arts in generating high-quality inpainting results.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

Ning Xin, Shaohui Xu, Fangzhe Nan, Xiaoli Dong, Weijun Li, Yuanzhou Yao

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Auto-TLDR; Continuous Learning for Face Attribute Synthesis

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The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.

Identity-Preserved Face Beauty Transformation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Zhitong Huang, Ching Y Suen

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Auto-TLDR; Identity-preserved face beauty transformation using conditional GANs

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Identity-preserved face beauty transformation aims to change the beauty scale of a face image while preserving the identity of the original face. In our framework of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), the synthesized face produced by the generator would have the same beauty scale indicated by the input condition. Unlike the discrete class labels used in most cGANs, the condition of target beauty scale in our framework is given by a continuous real-valued beauty score in the range [1 to 5], which makes the work challenging. To tackle the problem, we have implemented a triple structure, in which the conditional discriminator is divided into a normal discriminator and a separate face beauty predictor. We have also developed another new structure called Conditioned Instance Normalization to replace the original concatenation used in cGANs, which makes the combination of the input image and condition more effective. Furthermore, Self-Consistency Loss is introduced as a new parameter to improve the stability of training and quality of the generated image. In the end, the objectives of beauty transformation and identity preservation are evaluated by the pretrained face beauty predictor and state-of-the-art face recognition network. The result is encouraging and it also shows that certain facial features could be synthesized by the generator according to the target beauty scale, while preserving the original identity.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage

Jingzhi Li, Lutong Han, Hua Zhang, Xiaoguang Han, Jingguo Ge, Xiaochu Cao

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Auto-TLDR; Individual Face Privacy under Surveillance Scenario with Multi-task Loss Function

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In this paper, we focus on protecting the person face privacy under the surveillance scenarios, whose goal is to change the visual appearances of faces while keep them to be recognizable by current face recognition systems. This is a challenging problem as that we should retain the most important structures of captured facial images, while alter the salient facial regions to protect personal privacy. To address this problem, we introduce a novel individual face protection model, which can camouflage the face appearance from the perspective of human visual perception and preserve the identity features of faces used for face authentication. To that end, we develop an encoder-decoder network architecture that can separately disentangle the person feature representation into an appearance code and an identity code. Specifically, we first randomly divide the face image into two groups, the source set and the target set, where the source set is used to extract the identity code and the target set provides the appearance code. Then, we recombine the identity and appearance codes to synthesize a new face, which has the same identity with the source subject. Finally, the synthesized faces are used to replace the original face to protect the privacy of individual. Furthermore, our model is trained end-to-end with a multi-task loss function, which can better preserve the identity and stabilize the training loss. Experiments conducted on Cross-Age Celebrity dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and validate our superiority in terms of visual quality and scalability.

GarmentGAN: Photo-Realistic Adversarial Fashion Transfer

Amir Hossein Raffiee, Michael Sollami

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Auto-TLDR; GarmentGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Image-Based Garment Transfer

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The garment transfer problem comprises two tasks: learning to separate a person's body (pose, shape, color) from their clothing (garment type, shape, style) and then generating new images of the wearer dressed in arbitrary garments. We present GarmentGAN, a new algorithm that performs image-based garment transfer through generative adversarial methods. The GarmentGAN framework allows users to virtually try-on items before purchase and generalizes to various apparel types. GarmentGAN requires as input only two images, namely, a picture of the target fashion item and an image containing the customer. The output is a synthetic image wherein the customer is wearing the target apparel. In order to make the generated image look photo-realistic, we employ the use of novel generative adversarial techniques. GarmentGAN improves on existing methods in the realism of generated imagery and solves various problems related to self-occlusions. Our proposed model incorporates additional information during training, utilizing both segmentation maps and body key-point information. We show qualitative and quantitative comparisons to several other networks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique.

Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks and Fast Adaptive Bi-Dimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition for Style Transfer

Elissavet Batziou, Petros Alvanitopoulos, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Ioannis Patras, Stefanos Vrochidis, Ioannis Kompatsiaris

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Auto-TLDR; FABEMD: Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition for Style Transfer on Images

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Recently, research endeavors have shown the potentiality of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) in style transfer. In Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, the consistency loss is introduced to measure the difference between the original images and the reconstructed in both directions, forward and backward. In this work, the combination of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks with Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (FABEMD) is proposed to perform style transfer on images. In the proposed approach the cycle-consistency loss is modified to include the differences between the extracted Intrinsic Mode Functions (BIMFs) images. Instead of an estimation of pixel-to-pixel difference between the produced and input images, the FABEMD is applied and the extracted BIMFs are involved in the computation of the total cycle loss. This method enriches the computation of the total loss in a content-to-content and style-to-style comparison by connecting the spatial information to the frequency components. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is efficient and produces qualitative results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-Domain Image-To-Image Translation with Adaptive Inference Graph

The Phuc Nguyen, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Elisa Ricci

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Graph Structure for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

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In this work, we address the problem of multi-domain image-to-image translation with particular attention paid to computational cost. In particular, current state of the art models require a large and deep model in order to handle the visual diversity of multiple domains. In a context of limited computational resources, increasing the network size may not be possible. Therefore, we propose to increase the network capacity by using an adaptive graph structure. At inference time, the network estimates its own graph by selecting specific sub-networks. Sub-network selection is implemented using Gumble-Softmax in order to allow end-to-end training. This approach leads to an adjustable increase in number of parameters while preserving an almost constant computational cost. Our evaluation on two publicly available datasets of facial and painting images shows that our adaptive strategy generates better images with fewer artifacts than literature methods.

Attributes Aware Face Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Zheng Yuan, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen

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Auto-TLDR; AFGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Attributes Aware Face Image Generation

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Recent studies have shown remarkable success in face image generations. However, most of the existing methods only generate face images from random noise, and cannot generate face images according to the specific attributes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of face synthesis from attributes, which aims at generating faces with specific characteristics corresponding to the given attributes. To this end, we propose a novel attributes aware face image generator method with generative adversarial networks called AFGAN. Specifically, we firstly propose a two-path embedding layer and self-attention mechanism to convert binary attribute vector to rich attribute features. Then three stacked generators generate 64 * 64, 128 * 128 and 256 * 256 resolution face images respectively by taking the attribute features as input. In addition, an image-attribute matching loss is proposed to enhance the correlation between the generated images and input attributes. Extensive experiments on CelebA demonstrate the superiority of our AFGAN in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Detail Fusion GAN: High-Quality Translation for Unpaired Images with GAN-Based Data Augmentation

Ling Li, Yaochen Li, Chuan Wu, Hang Dong, Peilin Jiang, Fei Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation with GAN-based Generative Adversarial Network

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Image-to-image translation, a task to learn the mapping relation between two different domains, is a rapid-growing research field in deep learning. Although existing Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)-based methods have achieved decent results in this field, there are still some limitations in generating high-quality images for practical applications (e.g., data augmentation and image inpainting). In this work, we aim to propose a GAN-based network for data augmentation which can generate translated images with more details and less artifacts. The proposed Detail Fusion Generative Adversarial Network(DFGAN) consists of a detail branch, a transfer branch, a filter module, and a reconstruction module. The detail branch is trained by a super-resolution loss and its intermediate features can be used to introduce more details to the transfer branch by the filter module. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our model generates more satisfactory images against the state-of-the-art approaches for data augmentation.

UCCTGAN: Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

Shuming Sun, Xiaoqiang Li, Jide Li

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Auto-TLDR; An Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

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Clothing color transformation refers to changing the clothes color in an original image to the clothes color in a target image. In this paper, we propose an Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (UCCTGAN) for the task. UCCTGAN adopts the color histogram of a target clothes as color guidance and an improved U-net architecture called AntennaNet is put forward to fuse the extracted color information with the original image. Meanwhile, to accomplish unsupervised learning, the loss function is carefully designed according to color moment, which evaluates the chromatic aberration between the target clothing and the generated clothing. Experimental results show that our network has the ability to generate convincing color transformation results.

Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Image Synthesis: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Shichang Tang, Xu Zhou, Xuming He, Yi Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Controllable Image Synthesis in Deep Generative Models using Variational Auto-Encoder

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In this paper, we look into the problem of disentangled representation learning and controllable image synthesis in a deep generative model. We develop an encoder-decoder architecture for a variant of the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) with two latent codes $z_1$ and $z_2$. Our framework uses $z_2$ to capture specified factors of variation while $z_1$ captures the complementary factors of variation. To this end, we analyze the learning problem from the perspective of multivariate mutual information, derive optimizable lower bounds of the conditional mutual information in the image synthesis processes and incorporate them into the training objective. We validate our method empirically on the Color MNIST dataset and the CelebA dataset by showing controllable image syntheses. Our proposed paradigm is simple yet effective and is applicable to many situations, including those where there is not an explicit factorization of features available, or where the features are non-categorical.

SECI-GAN: Semantic and Edge Completion for Dynamic Objects Removal

Francesco Pinto, Andrea Romanoni, Matteo Matteucci, Phil Torr

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Auto-TLDR; SECI-GAN: Semantic and Edge Conditioned Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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Image inpainting aims at synthesizing the missing content of damaged and corrupted images to produce visually realistic restorations; typical applications are in image restoration, automatic scene editing, super-resolution, and dynamic object removal. In this paper, we propose Semantic and Edge Conditioned Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (SECI-GAN), an architecture that jointly exploits the high-level cues extracted by semantic segmentation and the fine-grained details captured by edge extraction to condition the image inpainting process. SECI-GAN is designed with a particular focus on recovering big regions belonging to the same object (e.g. cars or pedestrians) in the context of dynamic object removal from complex street views. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SECI-GAN, we evaluate our results on the Cityscapes dataset, showing that SECI-GAN is better than competing state-of-the-art models at recovering the structure and the content of the missing parts while producing consistent predictions.

SATGAN: Augmenting Age Biased Dataset for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Wenshuang Liu, Wenting Chen, Yuanlue Zhu, Linlin Shen

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Auto-TLDR; SATGAN: Stable Age Translation GAN for Cross-Age Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a Stable Age Translation GAN (SATGAN) to generate fake face images at different ages to augment age biased face datasets for Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) . The proposed SATGAN consists of both generator and discriminator. As a part of the generator, a novel Mask Attention Module (MAM) is introduced to make the generator focus on the face area. In addition, the generator employs a Uniform Distribution Discriminator (UDD) to supervise the learning of latent feature map and enforce the uniform distribution. Besides, the discriminator employs a Feature Separation Module (FSM) to disentangle identity information from the age information. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations on Morph dataset prove that SATGAN achieves much better performance than existing methods. The face recognition model trained using dataset (VGGFace2 and MS-Celeb-1M) augmented using our SATGAN achieves better accuracy on cross age dataset like Cross-Age LFW and AgeDB-30.

A GAN-Based Blind Inpainting Method for Masonry Wall Images

Yahya Ibrahim, Balázs Nagy, Csaba Benedek

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Auto-TLDR; An End-to-End Blind Inpainting Algorithm for Masonry Wall Images

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In this paper we introduce a novel end-to-end blind inpainting algorithm for masonry wall images, performing the automatic detection and virtual completion of occluded or damaged wall regions. For this purpose, we propose a three-stage deep neural network that comprises a U-Net-based sub-network for wall segmentation into brick, mortar and occluded regions, which is followed by a two-stage adversarial inpainting model. The first adversarial network predicts the schematic mortar-brick pattern of the occluded areas based on the observed wall structure, providing in itself valuable structural information for archeological and architectural applications. Finally, the second adversarial network predicts the RGB pixel values yielding a realistic visual experience for the observer. While the three stages implement a sequential pipeline, they interact through dependencies of their loss functions admitting the consideration of hidden feature dependencies between the different network components. For training and testing the network a new dataset has been created, and an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation versus the state-of-the-art is given.

AVAE: Adversarial Variational Auto Encoder

Antoine Plumerault, Hervé Le Borgne, Celine Hudelot

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Auto-TLDR; Combining VAE and GAN for Realistic Image Generation

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Among the wide variety of image generative models, two models stand out: Variational Auto Encoders (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GANs can produce realistic images, but they suffer from mode collapse and do not provide simple ways to get the latent representation of an image. On the other hand, VAEs do not have these problems, but they often generate images less realistic than GANs. In this article, we explain that this lack of realism is partially due to a common underestimation of the natural image manifold dimensionality. To solve this issue we introduce a new framework that combines VAE and GAN in a novel and complementary way to produce an auto-encoding model that keeps VAEs properties while generating images of GAN-quality. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on five image datasets.

Unsupervised Face Manipulation Via Hallucination

Keerthy Kusumam, Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

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Auto-TLDR; Unpaired Face Image Manipulation using Autoencoders

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This paper addresses the problem of manipulatinga face image in terms of changing its pose. To achieve this, wepropose a new method that can be trained under the very general“unpaired” setting. To this end, we firstly propose to modelthe general appearance, layout and background of the inputimage using a low-resolution version of it which is progressivelypassed through a hallucination network to generate featuresat higher resolutions. We show that such a formulation issignificantly simpler than previous approaches for appearancemodelling based on autoencoders. Secondly, we propose a fullylearnable and spatially-aware appearance transfer module whichcan cope with misalignment between the input source image andthe target pose and can effectively combine the features fromthe hallucination network with the features produced by ourgenerator. Thirdly, we introduce an identity preserving methodthat is trained in an unsupervised way, by using an auxiliaryfeature extractor and a contrastive loss between the real andgenerated images. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art reporting significant improvements both quantitatively, interms of FID and IS, and qualitatively.

Cascade Attention Guided Residue Learning GAN for Cross-Modal Translation

Bin Duan, Wei Wang, Hao Tang, Hugo Latapie, Yan Yan

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Auto-TLDR; Cascade Attention-Guided Residue GAN for Cross-modal Audio-Visual Learning

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Since we were babies, we intuitively develop the ability to correlate the input from different cognitive sensors such as vision, audio, and text. However, in machine learning, this cross-modal learning is a nontrivial task because different modalities have no homogeneous properties. Previous works discover that there should be bridges among different modalities. From neurology and psychology perspective, humans have the capacity to link one modality with another one, e.g., associating a picture of a bird with the only hearing of its singing and vice versa. Is it possible for machine learning algorithms to recover the scene given the audio signal? In this paper, we propose a novel Cascade Attention-Guided Residue GAN (CAR-GAN), aiming at reconstructing the scenes given the corresponding audio signals. Particularly, we present a residue module to mitigate the gap between different modalities progressively. Moreover, a cascade attention guided network with a novel classification loss function is designed to tackle the cross-modal learning task. Our model keeps consistency in the high-level semantic label domain and is able to balance two different modalities. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art cross-modal audio-visual generation on the challenging Sub-URMP dataset.

JUMPS: Joints Upsampling Method for Pose Sequences

Lucas Mourot, Francois Le Clerc, Cédric Thébault, Pierre Hellier

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Auto-TLDR; JUMPS: Increasing the Number of Joints in 2D Pose Estimation and Recovering Occluded or Missing Joints

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Human Pose Estimation is a low-level task useful for surveillance, human action recognition, and scene understanding at large. It also offers promising perspectives for the animation of synthetic characters. For all these applications, and especially the latter, estimating the positions of many joints is desirable for improved performance and realism. To this purpose, we propose a novel method called JUMPS for increasing the number of joints in 2D pose estimates and recovering occluded or missing joints. We believe this is the first attempt to address the issue. We build on a deep generative model that combines a GAN and an encoder. The GAN learns the distribution of high-resolution human pose sequences, the encoder maps the input low-resolution sequences to its latent space. Inpainting is obtained by computing the latent representation whose decoding by the GAN generator optimally matches the joints locations at the input. Post-processing a 2D pose sequence using our method provides a richer representation of the character motion. We show experimentally that the localization accuracy of the additional joints is on average on par with the original pose estimates.

Stylized-Colorization for Line Arts

Tzu-Ting Fang, Minh Duc Vo, Akihiro Sugimoto, Shang-Hong Lai

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Auto-TLDR; Stylized-colorization using GAN-based End-to-End Model for Anime

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We address a novel problem of stylized-colorization which colorizes a given line art using a given coloring style in text. This problem can be stated as multi-domain image translation and is more challenging than the current colorization problem because it requires not only capturing the illustration distribution but also satisfying the required coloring styles specific to anime such as lightness, shading, or saturation. We propose a GAN-based end-to-end model for stylized-colorization where the model has one generator and two discriminators. Our generator is based on the U-Net architecture and receives a pair of a line art and a coloring style in text as its input to produce a stylized-colorization image of the line art. Two discriminators, on the other hand, share weights at early layers to judge the stylized-colorization image in two different aspects: one for color and one for style. One generator and two discriminators are jointly trained in an adversarial and end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Dual-MTGAN: Stochastic and Deterministic Motion Transfer for Image-To-Video Synthesis

Fu-En Yang, Jing-Cheng Chang, Yuan-Hao Lee, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Dual Motion Transfer GAN for Convolutional Neural Networks

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Generating videos with content and motion variations is a challenging task in computer vision. While the recent development of GAN allows video generation from latent representations, it is not easy to produce videos with particular content of motion patterns of interest. In this paper, we propose Dual Motion Transfer GAN (Dual-MTGAN), which takes image and video data as inputs while learning disentangled content and motion representations. Our Dual-MTGAN is able to perform deterministic motion transfer and stochastic motion generation. Based on a given image, the former preserves the input content and transfers motion patterns observed from another video sequence, and the latter directly produces videos with plausible yet diverse motion patterns based on the input image. The proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner, without the need to utilize pre-defined motion features like pose or facial landmarks. Our quantitative and qualitative results would confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our model in addressing such conditioned image-to-video tasks.

Multi-Laplacian GAN with Edge Enhancement for Face Super Resolution

Shanlei Ko, Bi-Ru Dai

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Auto-TLDR; Face Image Super-Resolution with Enhanced Edge Information

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Face image super-resolution has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Nowadays, more and more researches add additional information, such as landmark, identity, to reconstruct high resolution images from low resolution ones, and have a good performance in quantitative terms and perceptual quality. However, these additional information is hard to obtain in many cases. In this work, we focus on reconstructing face images by extracting useful information from face images directly rather than using additional information. By observing edge information in each scale of face images, we propose a method to reconstruct high resolution face images with enhanced edge information. In additional, with the proposed training procedure, our method reconstructs photo-realistic images in upscaling factor 8x and outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in quantitative terms and perceptual quality.

Local-Global Interactive Network for Face Age Transformation

Jie Song, Ping Wei, Huan Li, Yongchi Zhang, Nanning Zheng

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Auto-TLDR; A Novel Local-Global Interaction Framework for Long-span Face Age Transformation

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Face age transformation, which aims to generate a face image in the past or future, has receiving increasing attention due to its significant application value in some special fields, such as looking for a lost child, tracking criminals and entertainment, etc. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on unidirectional short-span face aging. In this paper, we propose a novel local-global interaction framework for long-span face age transformation. Firstly, we divide a face image into five independent parts and design a local generative network for each of them to learn the local structure changes of a face image, while we utilize a global generative network to learn the global structure changes. Then we introduce an interactive network and an age classification network, which are respectively used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the corresponding age features in different age groups. Given any face image at a certain age, our network can produce a clear and realistic image of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on complex datasets, and extensive qualitative comparison experiments has proved the effectiveness and immense potential of our proposed method.

Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization for Unpaired Image-To-Image Translation

Takehiko Ohkawa, Naoto Inoue, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Nakamasa Inoue

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Auto-TLDR; Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

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Unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation has received considerable attention in pattern recognition and computer vision because of recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, due to the lack of explicit supervision, unpaired I2I models often fail to generate realistic images, especially in challenging datasets with different backgrounds and poses. Hence, stabilization is indispensable for real-world applications and GANs. Herein, we propose Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization (ACCR), a novel regularization method for unpaired I2I translation. Our main idea is to enforce consistency regularization originating from semi-supervised learning on the discriminators leveraging real, fake, reconstructed, and augmented samples. We regularize the discriminators to output similar predictions when fed pairs of original and perturbed images. We qualitatively clarify the generation property between unpaired I2I models and standard GANs, and explain why consistency regularization on fake and reconstructed samples works well. Quantitatively, our method outperforms the consistency regularized GAN (CR-GAN) in real-world translations and demonstrates efficacy against several data augmentation variants and cycle-consistent constraints.

An Unsupervised Approach towards Varying Human Skin Tone Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Debapriya Roy, Diganta Mukherjee, Bhabatosh Chanda

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Skin Tone Change Using Augmented Reality Based Models

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With the increasing popularity of augmented and virtual reality, retailers are now more focusing towards customer satisfaction to increase the amount of sales. Although augmented reality is not a new concept but it has gained its much needed attention over the past few years. Our present work is targeted towards this direction which may be used to enhance user experience in various virtual and augmented reality based applications. We propose a model to change skin tone of person. Given any input image of a person or a group of persons with some value indicating the desired change of skin color towards fairness or darkness, this method can change the skin tone of the persons in the image. This is an unsupervised method and also unconstrained in terms of pose, illumination, number of persons in the image etc. The goal of this work is to reduce the complexity in terms of time and effort which is generally needed for changing the skin tone using existing applications by professionals or novice. Rigorous experiments shows the efficacy of this method in terms of synthesizing perceptually convincing outputs.

Learning Low-Shot Generative Networks for Cross-Domain Data

Hsuan-Kai Kao, Cheng-Che Lee, Wei-Chen Chiu

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Generators for Cross-Domain Data under Low-Shot Learning

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We tackle a novel problem of learning generators for cross-domain data under a specific scenario of low-shot learning. Basically, given a source domain with sufficient amount of training data, we aim to transfer the knowledge of its generative process to another target domain, which not only has few data samples but also contains the domain shift with respect to the source domain. This problem has great potential in practical use and is different from the well-known image translation task, as the target-domain data can be generated without requiring any source-domain ones and the large data consumption for learning target-domain generator can be alleviated. Built upon a cross-domain dataset where (1) each of the low shots in the target domain has its correspondence in the source and (2) these two domains share the similar content information but different appearance, two approaches are proposed: a Latent-Disentanglement-Orientated model (LaDo) and a Generative-Hierarchy-Oriented (GenHo) model. Our LaDo and GenHo approaches address the problem from different perspectives, where the former relies on learning the disentangled representation composed of domain-invariant content features and domain-specific appearance ones; while the later decomposes the generative process of a generator into two parts for synthesizing the content and appearance sequentially. We perform extensive experiments under various settings of cross-domain data and show the efficacy of our models for generating target-domain data with the abundant content variance as in the source domain, which lead to the favourable performance in comparison to several baselines.

Learning Image Inpainting from Incomplete Images using Self-Supervision

Sriram Yenamandra, Rohit Kumar Jena, Ansh Khurana, Suyash Awate

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Deep Neural Network for Semantic Image Inpainting

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Current approaches for semantic image inpainting rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) that learn under full supervision, i.e., using a training set comprising pairs of (i)corrupted images with holes and (ii)corresponding uncorrupted images. However, for several real-world applications, obtaining large sets of uncorrupted images is challenging or infeasible. Current methods also rely on adversarial training involving min-max optimization that is prone to instability during learning. We propose a novel image-inpainting DNN framework that can learn in both completely unsupervised and semi-supervised modes. Moreover, our DNN learning formulation bypasses adversarial training and, thereby, lends itself to more stable training. Results on the publicly available CelebA dataset show that our method, even when learning unsupervisedly, outperforms the state of the art that learns with full supervision.

Attention2AngioGAN: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Retinal Fundus Images Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Sharif Amit Kamran, Khondker Fariha Hossain, Alireza Tavakkoli, Stewart Lee Zuckerbrod

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Auto-TLDR; Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images using Attention-based Generative Networks

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Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a technique that employs the designated camera for Fundus photography incorporating excitation and barrier filters. FA also requires fluorescein dye that is injected intravenously, which might cause adverse effects ranging from nausea, vomiting to even fatal anaphylaxis. Currently, no other fast and non-invasive technique exists that can generate FA without coupling with Fundus photography. To eradicate the need for an invasive FA extraction procedure, we introduce an Attention-based Generative network that can synthesize Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus images. The proposed gan incorporates multiple attention based skip connections in generators and comprises novel residual blocks for both generators and discriminators. It utilizes reconstruction, feature-matching, and perceptual loss along with adversarial training to produces realistic Angiograms that is hard for experts to distinguish from real ones. Our experiments confirm that the proposed architecture surpasses recent state-of-the-art generative networks for fundus-to-angio translation task.

Phase Retrieval Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Tobias Uelwer, Alexander Oberstraß, Stefan Harmeling

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Auto-TLDR; Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Phase Retrieval

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In this paper, we propose the application of conditional generative adversarial networks to solve various phase retrieval problems. We show that including knowledge of the measurement process at training time leads to an optimization at test time that is more robust to initialization than existing approaches involving generative models. In addition, conditioning the generator network on the measurements enables us to achieve much more detailed results. We empirically demonstrate that these advantages provide meaningful solutions to the Fourier and the compressive phase retrieval problem and that our method outperforms well-established projection-based methods as well as existing methods that are based on neural networks. Like other deep learning methods, our approach is very robust to noise and can therefore be very useful for real-world applications.

Controllable Face Aging

Haien Zeng, Hanjiang Lai

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Auto-TLDR; A controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network

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Motivated by the following two observations: 1) people are aging differently under different conditions for changeable facial attributes, e.g., skin color may become darker when working outside, and 2) it needs to keep some unchanged facial attributes during the aging process, e.g., race and gender, we propose a controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network. To offer fine control over the synthesized face images, first, an individual embedding of the face is directly learned from an image that contains the desired facial attribute. Second, since the image may contain other unwanted attributes, an attribute disentanglement network is used to separate the individual embedding and learn the common embedding that contains information about the face attribute (e.g., race). With the common embedding, we can manipulate the generated face image with the desired attribute in an explicit manner. Experimental results on two common benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed generator achieves comparable performance on the aging effect with state-of-the-art baselines while gaining more flexibility for attribute control. Code is available at supplementary material.

Boundary Guided Image Translation for Pose Estimation from Ultra-Low Resolution Thermal Sensor

Kohei Kurihara, Tianren Wang, Teng Zhang, Brian Carrington Lovell

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Auto-TLDR; Pose Estimation on Low-Resolution Thermal Images Using Image-to-Image Translation Architecture

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This work addresses the pose estimation task on low-resolution images captured using thermal sensors which can operate in a no-light environment. Low-resolution thermal sensors have been widely adopted in various applications for cost control and privacy protection purposes. In this paper, targeting the challenging scenario of ultra-low resolution thermal imaging (3232 pixels), we aim to estimate human poses for the purpose of monitoring health conditions and indoor events. To overcome the challenges in ultra-low resolution thermal imaging such as blurred boundaries and data scarcity, we propose a new Image-to-Image (I2I) translation architecture which can translate the original blurred thermal image into a visible light image with sharper boundaries. Then the generated visible light image can be fed into the off-the-shelf pose estimator which was well-trained in the visible domain. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the I2I based pose estimation task for our thermal image dataset. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the merits of the proposed method on the publicly available FLIR dataset by measuring the quality of translated images.

Future Urban Scenes Generation through Vehicles Synthesis

Alessandro Simoni, Luca Bergamini, Andrea Palazzi, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Predicting the Future of an Urban Scene with a Novel View Synthesis Paradigm

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In this work we propose a deep learning pipeline to predict the visual future appearance of an urban scene. Despite recent advances, generating the entire scene in an end-to-end fashion is still far from being achieved. Instead, here we follow a two stages approach, where interpretable information is included in the loop and each actor is modelled independently. We leverage a per-object novel view synthesis paradigm; i.e. generating a synthetic representation of an object undergoing a geometrical roto-translation in the 3D space. Our model can be easily conditioned with constraints (e.g. input trajectories) provided by state-of-the-art tracking methods or by the user itself. This allows us to generate a set of diverse realistic futures starting from the same input in a multi-modal fashion. We visually and quantitatively show the superiority of this approach over traditional end-to-end scene-generation methods on CityFlow, a challenging real world dataset.

Unsupervised Contrastive Photo-To-Caricature Translation Based on Auto-Distortion

Yuhe Ding, Xin Ma, Mandi Luo, Aihua Zheng, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised contrastive photo-to-caricature translation with style loss

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Photo-to-caricature aims to synthesize the caricature as a rendered image exaggerating the features through sketching, pencil strokes, or other artistic drawings. Style rendering and geometry deformation are the most important aspects in photo-to-caricature translation task. To take both into consideration, we propose an unsupervised contrastive photo-to-caricature translation architecture. Considering the intuitive artifacts in the existing methods, we propose a contrastive style loss for style rendering to enforce the similarity between the style of rendered photo and the caricature, and simultaneously enhance its discrepancy to the photos. To obtain an exaggerating deformation in an unpaired/unsupervised fashion, we propose a Distortion Prediction Module (DPM) to predict a set of displacements vectors for each input image while fixing some controlling points, followed by the thin plate spline interpolation for warping. The model is trained on unpaired photo and caricature while can offer bidirectional synthesizing via inputting either a photo or a caricature. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is effective to generate hand-drawn like caricatures compared with existing competitors.

Age Gap Reducer-GAN for Recognizing Age-Separated Faces

Daksha Yadav, Naman Kohli, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Afzel Noore

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Network for Age-separated Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework which combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject's gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.

Disentangle, Assemble, and Synthesize: Unsupervised Learning to Disentangle Appearance and Location

Hiroaki Aizawa, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Yutaka Satoh, Kunihito Kato

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Networks with Structural Constraint for controllability of latent space

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The next step for the generative adversarial networks~(GAN) is to learn representations that allow us to control only a certain factor in the image explicitly. Since such a representation of the factor is independent of other factors, the controllability obtained from these representations leads to interpretability by identifying the variation of the synthesized image and the transferability for downstream tasks by inference. However, since it is difficult to identify and strictly define latent factors, the annotation is laborious. Moreover, learning such representations by a GAN is challenging due to the complex generation process. Therefore, we resolve this limitation using a novel generative model that can disentangle latent space into the appearance, the x-axis, and the y-axis of the object, and reassemble these components in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, based on the concept of packing the appearance and location in each position of the feature map, we introduce a novel structural constraint technique that prevents these representations from interacting with each other. The proposed structural constraint promotes the disentanglement of these factors. In experiments, we found that the proposed method is simple but effective for controllability and allows us to control the appearance and location via latent space without supervision, as compared with the conditional GAN.

GAP: Quantifying the Generative Adversarial Set and Class Feature Applicability of Deep Neural Networks

Edward Collier, Supratik Mukhopadhyay

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Auto-TLDR; Approximating Adversarial Learning in Deep Neural Networks Using Set and Class Adversaries

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Recent work in deep neural networks has sought to characterize the nature in which a network learns features and how applicable learnt features are to various problem sets. Deep neural network applicability can be split into three sub-problems; set applicability, class applicability, and instance applicability. In this work we seek to quantify the applicability of features learned during adversarial training, focusing specifically on set and class applicability. We apply techniques for measuring applicability to both generators and discriminators trained on various data sets to quantify applicability and better observe how both a generator and a discriminator, and generative models as a whole, learn features during adversarial training.

Efficient Shadow Detection and Removal Using Synthetic Data with Domain Adaptation

Rui Guo, Babajide Ayinde, Hao Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Shadow Detection and Removal with Domain Adaptation and Synthetic Image Database

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In recent years, learning based shadow detection and removal approaches have shown prospects and, in most cases, yielded state-of-the-art results. The performance of these approaches, however, relies heavily on the construction of training database of shadow images, shadow-free versions, and shadow maps as ground truth. This conventional data gathering method is time-consuming, expensive, or even practically intractable to realize especially for outdoor scenes with complicated shadow patterns, thus limiting the size of the data available for training. In this paper, we leverage on large high quality synthetic image database and domain adaptation to eliminate the bottlenecks resulting from insufficient training samples and domain bias. Specifically, our approach utilizes adversarial training to predict near-pixel-perfect shadow map from synthetic shadow image for downstream shadow removal steps. At inference time, we capitalize on domain adaptation via image style transfer to map the style of real- world scene to that of synthetic scene for the purpose of detecting and subsequently removing shadow. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on select benchmark datasets.

SIDGAN: Single Image Dehazing without Paired Supervision

Pan Wei, Xin Wang, Lei Wang, Ji Xiang, Zihan Wang

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Auto-TLDR; DehazeGAN: An End-to-End Generative Adversarial Network for Image Dehazing

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Single image dehazing is challenging without scene airlight and transmission map. Most of existing dehazing algorithms tend to estimate key parameters based on manual designed priors or statistics, which may be invalid in some scenarios. Although deep learning-based dehazing methods provide an effective solution, most of them rely on paired training datasets, which are prohibitively difficult to be collected in real world. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end generative adversarial network for image dehazing, named DehazeGAN. The proposed DehazeGAN adopts a U-net architecture with a novel color-consistency loss derived from dark channel prior and perceptual loss, which can be trained in an unsupervised fashion without paired synthetic datasets. We create a RealHaze dataset for network training, including 4,000 outdoor hazy images and 4,000 haze-free images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DehazeGAN achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and subjective visual experience.

Robust Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Imagery Using Synthesized Images

My Kieu, Lorenzo Berlincioni, Leonardo Galteri, Marco Bertini, Andrew Bagdanov, Alberto Del Bimbo

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Pedestrian Detection in the thermal domain using Generative Adversarial Network

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In this paper we propose a method for improving pedestrian detection in the thermal domain using two stages: first, a generative data augmentation approach is used, then a domain adaptation method using generated data adapts an RGB pedestrian detector. Our model, based on the Least-Squares Generative Adversarial Network, is trained to synthesize realistic thermal versions of input RGB images which are then used to augment the limited amount of labeled thermal pedestrian images available for training. We apply our generative data augmentation strategy in order to adapt a pretrained YOLOv3 pedestrian detector to detection in the thermal-only domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: using less than 50% of available real thermal training data, and relying on synthesized data generated by our model in the domain adaptation phase, our detector achieves state-of-the-art results on the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Benchmark; even if more real thermal data is available adding GAN generated images to the training data results in improved performance, thus showing that these images act as an effective form of data augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, our detector achieves the best single-modality detection results on KAIST with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Data Augmentation Via Mixed Class Interpolation Using Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks Applied to Cross-Domain Imagery

Hiroshi Sasaki, Chris G. Willcocks, Toby Breckon

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Auto-TLDR; C2GMA: A Generative Domain Transfer Model for Non-visible Domain Classification

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Machine learning driven object detection and classification within non-visible imagery has an important role in many fields such as night vision, all-weather surveillance and aviation security. However, such applications often suffer due to the limited quantity and variety of non-visible spectral domain imagery, in contrast to the high data availability of visible-band imagery that readily enables contemporary deep learning driven detection and classification approaches. To address this problem, this paper proposes and evaluates a novel data augmentation approach that leverages the more readily available visible-band imagery via a generative domain transfer model. The model can synthesise large volumes of non-visible domain imagery by image-to-image (I2I) translation from the visible image domain. Furthermore, we show that the generation of interpolated mixed class (non-visible domain) image examples via our novel Conditional CycleGAN Mixup Augmentation (C2GMA) methodology can lead to a significant improvement in the quality of non-visible domain classification tasks that otherwise suffer due to limited data availability. Focusing on classification within the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) domain, our approach is evaluated on a variation of the Statoil/C-CORE Iceberg Classifier Challenge dataset and achieves 75.4% accuracy, demonstrating a significant improvement when compared against traditional data augmentation strategies (Rotation, Mixup, and MixCycleGAN).

Combining GANs and AutoEncoders for Efficient Anomaly Detection

Fabio Carrara, Giuseppe Amato, Luca Brombin, Fabrizio Falchi, Claudio Gennaro

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Auto-TLDR; CBIGAN: Anomaly Detection in Images with Consistency Constrained BiGAN

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In this work, we propose CBiGAN --- a novel method for anomaly detection in images, where a consistency constraint is introduced as a regularization term in both the encoder and decoder of a BiGAN. Our model exhibits fairly good modeling power and reconstruction consistency capability. We evaluate the proposed method on MVTec AD --- a real-world benchmark for unsupervised anomaly detection on high-resolution images --- and compare against standard baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of BiGAN formulations by a large margin and performs comparably to expensive state-of-the-art iterative methods while reducing the computational cost. We also observe that our model is particularly effective in texture-type anomaly detection, as it sets a new state of the art in this category. The code will be publicly released.

Unsupervised Multi-Task Domain Adaptation

Shih-Min Yang, Mei-Chen Yeh

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multi-task Learning for Image Recognition

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With abundant labeled data, deep convolutional neural networks have shown great success in various image recognition tasks. However, these models are often less powerful when applied to novel datasets due to a phenomenon known as domain shift. Unsupervised domain adaptation methods aim to address this problem, allowing deep models trained on the labeled source domain to be used on a different target domain (without labels). In this paper, we investigate whether the generalization ability of an unsupervised domain adaptation method can be improved through multi-task learning, with learned features required to be both domain invariant and discriminative for multiple different but relevant tasks. Experiments evaluating two fundamental recognition tasks---including image recognition and segmentation--- show that the generalization ability empowered by multi-task learning may not benefit recognition when the model is directly applied on the target domain, but the multi-task setting can boost the performance of state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods by a non-negligible margin.

Towards Artifacts-Free Image Defogging

Gabriele Graffieti, Davide Maltoni

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Auto-TLDR; CurL-Defog: Learning Based Defogging with CycleGAN and HArD

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In this paper we present a novel defogging technique, named CurL-Defog, aimed at minimizing the creation of artifacts. The majority of learning based defogging approaches relies on paired data (i.e., the same images with and without fog), where fog is artificially added to clear images: this often provides good results on mildly fogged images but does not generalize well to real difficult cases. On the other hand, the models trained with real unpaired data (e.g. CycleGAN) can provide visually impressive results but often produce unwanted artifacts. In this paper we propose a curriculum learning strategy coupled with an enhanced CycleGAN model in order to reduce the number of produced artifacts, while maintaining state-of-the- art performance in terms of contrast enhancement and image reconstruction. We also introduce a new metric, called HArD (Hazy Artifact Detector) to numerically quantify the amount of artifacts in the defogged images, thus avoiding the tedious and subjective manual inspection of the results. The proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art techniques on both real and synthetic datasets.