Asymmetric GAN for Unpaired Image-to-image Translation

Unpaired image-to-image translation problem aims to model the mapping from one domain to another with unpaired training data. Current works like the well-acknowledged Cycle GAN provide a general solution for any two domains through modeling injective mappings with a symmetric structure. While in situations where two domains are asymmetric in complexity, i.e., the amount of information between two domains is different, these approaches pose problems of poor generation quality, mapping ambiguity, and model sensitivity. To address these issues, we propose Asymmetric GAN (AsymGAN) to adapt the asymmetric domains by introducing an auxiliary variable (aux) to learn the extra information for transferring from the information-poor domain to the information-rich domain, which improves the performance of state-of-the-art approaches in the following ways. First, aux better balances the information between two domains which benefits the quality of generation. Second, the imbalance of information commonly leads to mapping ambiguity, where we are able to model one-to-many mappings by tuning aux, and furthermore, our aux is controllable. Third, the training of Cycle GAN can easily make the generator pair sensitive to small disturbances and variations while our model decouples the ill-conditioned relevance of generators by injecting aux during training. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed method both qualitatively and quantitatively on asymmetric situation, label-photo task, on Cityscapes and Helen datasets, and show many applications of asymmetric image translations. In conclusion, our AsymGAN provides a better solution for unpaired image-to-image translation in asymmetric domains.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) 201

Asymmetric Generative Adversarial Networks for Image-to-Image Translation

State-of-the-art models for unpaired image-to-image translation with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can learn the mapping from the source domain to the target domain using a cycle-consistency loss. The intuition behind these models is that if we translate from one domain to the other and back again we should arrive at where we started. However, existing methods always adopt a symmetric network architecture to learn both forward and backward cycles. Because of the task complexity and cycle input difference between the source and target image domains, the inequality in bidirectional forward-backward cycle translations is significant and the amount of information between two domains is different. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of the existing symmetric GAN models in asymmetric translation tasks, and propose an AsymmetricGAN model with both translation and reconstruction generators of unequal sizes and different parameter-sharing strategy to adapt to the asymmetric need in both unsupervised and supervised image-to-image translation tasks. Moreover, the training stage of existing methods has the common problem of model collapse that degrades the quality of the generated images, thus we explore different optimization losses for better training of AsymmetricGAN, and thus make image-to-image translation with higher consistency and better stability. Extensive experiments on both supervised and unsupervised generative tasks with several publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed AsymmetricGAN achieves superior model capacity and better generation performance compared with existing GAN models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the asymmetric GAN framework on both unsupervised and supervised image-to-image translation tasks. The source code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/AsymmetricGAN.Comment: An extended version of a paper published in ACCV2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1901.0460

Conditional Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation tasks have been widely investigated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and dual learning. However, existing models lack the ability to control the translated results in the target domain and their results usually lack of diversity in the sense that a fixed image usually leads to (almost) deterministic translation result. In this paper, we study a new problem, conditional image-to-image translation, which is to translate an image from the source domain to the target domain conditioned on a given image in the target domain. It requires that the generated image should inherit some domain-specific features of the conditional image from the target domain. Therefore, changing the conditional image in the target domain will lead to diverse translation results for a fixed input image from the source domain, and therefore the conditional input image helps to control the translation results. We tackle this problem with unpaired data based on GANs and dual learning. We twist two conditional translation models (one translation from A domain to B domain, and the other one from B domain to A domain) together for inputs combination and reconstruction while preserving domain independent features. We carry out experiments on men's faces from-to women's faces translation and edges to shoes&bags translations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR

An Asymmetric Cycle-Consistency Loss for Dealing with Many-to-One Mappings in Image Translation: A Study on Thigh MR Scans

Generative adversarial networks using a cycle-consistency loss facilitate unpaired training of image-translation models and thereby exhibit a very high potential in manifold medical applications. However, the fact that images in one domain potentially map to more than one image in another domain (e.g. in case of pathological changes) exhibits a major challenge for training the networks. In this work, we offer a solution to improve the training process in case of many-to-one mappings by modifying the cycle-consistency loss. We show formally and empirically that the proposed method improves the performance significantly without radically changing the architecture and without increasing the overall complexity. We evaluate our method on thigh MRI scans with the final goal of segmenting the muscle in fat-infiltrated patients' data.Comment: Presented at IEEE ISBI'2

Implicit Pairs for Boosting Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

In image-to-image translation the goal is to learn a mapping from one image domain to another. In the case of supervised approaches the mapping is learned from paired samples. However, collecting large sets of image pairs is often either prohibitively expensive or not possible. As a result, in recent years more attention has been given to techniques that learn the mapping from unpaired sets. In our work, we show that injecting implicit pairs into unpaired sets strengthens the mapping between the two domains, improves the compatibility of their distributions, and leads to performance boosting of unsupervised techniques by over 14% across several measurements. The competence of the implicit pairs is further displayed with the use of pseudo-pairs, i.e., paired samples which only approximate a real pair. We demonstrate the effect of the approximated implicit samples on image-to-image translation problems, where such pseudo-pairs may be synthesized in one direction, but not in the other. We further show that pseudo-pairs are significantly more effective as implicit pairs in an unpaired setting, than directly using them explicitly in a paired setting

Expression Conditional GAN for Facial Expression-to-Expression Translation

In this paper, we focus on the facial expression translation task and propose a novel Expression Conditional GAN (ECGAN) which can learn the mapping from one image domain to another one based on an additional expression attribute. The proposed ECGAN is a generic framework and is applicable to different expression generation tasks where specific facial expression can be easily controlled by the conditional attribute label. Besides, we introduce a novel face mask loss to reduce the influence of background changing. Moreover, we propose an entire framework for facial expression generation and recognition in the wild, which consists of two modules, i.e., generation and recognition. Finally, we evaluate our framework on several public face datasets in which the subjects have different races, illumination, occlusion, pose, color, content and background conditions. Even though these datasets are very diverse, both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our approach is able to generate facial expressions accurately and robustly.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted to ICIP 201

LADN: Local Adversarial Disentangling Network for Facial Makeup and De-Makeup

We propose a local adversarial disentangling network (LADN) for facial makeup and de-makeup. Central to our method are multiple and overlapping local adversarial discriminators in a content-style disentangling network for achieving local detail transfer between facial images, with the use of asymmetric loss functions for dramatic makeup styles with high-frequency details. Existing techniques do not demonstrate or fail to transfer high-frequency details in a global adversarial setting, or train a single local discriminator only to ensure image structure consistency and thus work only for relatively simple styles. Unlike others, our proposed local adversarial discriminators can distinguish whether the generated local image details are consistent with the corresponding regions in the given reference image in cross-image style transfer in an unsupervised setting. Incorporating these technical contributions, we achieve not only state-of-the-art results on conventional styles but also novel results involving complex and dramatic styles with high-frequency details covering large areas across multiple facial features. A carefully designed dataset of unpaired before and after makeup images is released.Comment: Qiao and Guanzhi have equal contribution. Accepted to ICCV 2019. Project website: https://georgegu1997.github.io/LADN-project-page

TraVeLGAN: Image-to-image Translation by Transformation Vector Learning

Interest in image-to-image translation has grown substantially in recent years with the success of unsupervised models based on the cycle-consistency assumption. The achievements of these models have been limited to a particular subset of domains where this assumption yields good results, namely homogeneous domains that are characterized by style or texture differences. We tackle the challenging problem of image-to-image translation where the domains are defined by high-level shapes and contexts, as well as including significant clutter and heterogeneity. For this purpose, we introduce a novel GAN based on preserving intra-domain vector transformations in a latent space learned by a siamese network. The traditional GAN system introduced a discriminator network to guide the generator into generating images in the target domain. To this two-network system we add a third: a siamese network that guides the generator so that each original image shares semantics with its generated version. With this new three-network system, we no longer need to constrain the generators with the ubiquitous cycle-consistency restraint. As a result, the generators can learn mappings between more complex domains that differ from each other by large differences - not just style or texture

Label-Noise Robust Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

Multi-domain image-to-image translation is a problem where the goal is to learn mappings among multiple domains. This problem is challenging in terms of scalability because it requires the learning of numerous mappings, the number of which increases proportional to the number of domains. However, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged recently as a powerful framework for this problem. In particular, label-conditional extensions (e.g., StarGAN) have become a promising solution owing to their ability to address this problem using only a single unified model. Nonetheless, a limitation is that they rely on the availability of large-scale clean-labeled data, which are often laborious or impractical to collect in a real-world scenario. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel model called the label-noise robust image-to-image translation model (RMIT) that can learn a clean label conditional generator even when noisy labeled data are only available. In particular, we propose a novel loss called the virtual cycle consistency loss that is able to regularize cyclic reconstruction independently of noisy labeled data, as well as we introduce advanced techniques to boost the performance in practice. Our experimental results demonstrate that RMIT is useful for obtaining label-noise robustness in various settings including synthetic and real-world noise

Mask-Guided Portrait Editing with Conditional GANs

Portrait editing is a popular subject in photo manipulation. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) advances the generating of realistic faces and allows more face editing. In this paper, we argue about three issues in existing techniques: diversity, quality, and controllability for portrait synthesis and editing. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end learning framework that leverages conditional GANs guided by provided face masks for generating faces. The framework learns feature embeddings for every face component (e.g., mouth, hair, eye), separately, contributing to better correspondences for image translation, and local face editing. With the mask, our network is available to many applications, like face synthesis driven by mask, face Swap+ (including hair in swapping), and local manipulation. It can also boost the performance of face parsing a bit as an option of data augmentation.Comment: To appear in CVPR201