IntersectGAN: Learning Domain Intersection for Generating Images with Multiple Attributes

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated great success in generating various visual content. However, images generated by existing GANs are often of attributes (e.g., smiling expression) learned from one image domain. As a result, generating images of multiple attributes requires many real samples possessing multiple attributes which are very resource expensive to be collected. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN, namely IntersectGAN, to learn multiple attributes from different image domains through an intersecting architecture. For example, given two image domains $X_1$ and $X_2$ with certain attributes, the intersection $X_1 \cap X_2$ denotes a new domain where images possess the attributes from both $X_1$ and $X_2$ domains. The proposed IntersectGAN consists of two discriminators $D_1$ and $D_2$ to distinguish between generated and real samples of different domains, and three generators where the intersection generator is trained against both discriminators. And an overall adversarial loss function is defined over three generators. As a result, our proposed IntersectGAN can be trained on multiple domains of which each presents one specific attribute, and eventually eliminates the need of real sample images simultaneously possessing multiple attributes. By using the CelebFaces Attributes dataset, our proposed IntersectGAN is able to produce high quality face images possessing multiple attributes (e.g., a face with black hair and a smiling expression). Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted to compare our proposed IntersectGAN with other baseline methods. Besides, several different applications of IntersectGAN have been explored with promising results

Deep Learning Based Face Image Synthesis

Face image synthesis is an important problem in the biometrics and computer vision communities due to its applications in law enforcement and entertainment. In this thesis, we develop novel deep neural network models and associated loss functions for two face image synthesis problems, namely thermal to visible face synthesis and visual attribute to face synthesis. In particular, for thermal to visible face synthesis, we propose a model which makes use of facial attributes to obtain better synthesis. We use attributes extracted from visible images to synthesize attribute-preserved visible images from thermal imagery. A pre-trained attribute predictor network is used to extract attributes from the visible image. Then, a novel multi-scale generator is proposed to synthesize the visible image from the thermal image guided by the extracted attributes. Finally, a pre-trained VGG-Face network is leveraged to extract features from the synthesized image and the input visible image for verification. In addition, we propose another thermal to visible face synthesis method based on selfattention generative adversarial network (SAGAN) which allows efficient attention-guided image synthesis. Rather than focusing only on synthesizing visible faces from thermal faces, we also propose to synthesize thermal faces from visible faces. Our intuition is based on the fact that thermal images also contain some discriminative information about the person for verification. Deep features from a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are extracted from the original as well as the synthesized images. These features are then fused to generate a template which is then used for cross-modal face verification. Regarding attribute to face image synthesis, we propose the Att2SK2Face model for face image synthesis from visual attributes via sketch. In this approach, we first synthesize facial sketch corresponding to the visual attributes and then generate the face image based on the synthesized sketch. The proposed framework is based on a combination of two different Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – (1) a sketch generator network which synthesizes realistic sketch from the input attributes, and (2) a face generator network which synthesizes facial images from the synthesized sketch images with the help of facial attributes. Finally, we propose another synthesis model, called Att2MFace, which can simultaneously synthesize multimodal faces from visual attributes without requiring paired data in different domains for training the network. We introduce a novel generator with multimodal stretch-out modules to simultaneously synthesize multimodal face images. Additionally, multimodal stretch-in modules are introduced in the discriminator which discriminate between real and fake images