Edge Guided GANs with Semantic Preserving for Semantic Image Synthesis

We propose a novel Edge guided Generative Adversarial Network (EdgeGAN) for photo-realistic image synthesis from semantic layouts. Although considerable improvement has been achieved, the quality of synthesized images is far from satisfactory due to two largely unresolved challenges. First, the semantic labels do not provide detailed structural information, making it difficult to synthesize local details and structures. Second, the widely adopted CNN operations such as convolution, down-sampling and normalization usually cause spatial resolution loss and thus are unable to fully preserve the original semantic information, leading to semantically inconsistent results (e.g., missing small objects). To tackle the first challenge, we propose to use the edge as an intermediate representation which is further adopted to guide image generation via a proposed attention guided edge transfer module. Edge information is produced by a convolutional generator and introduces detailed structure information. Further, to preserve the semantic information, we design an effective module to selectively highlight class-dependent feature maps according to the original semantic layout. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets show that the proposed EdgeGAN can generate significantly better results than state-of-the-art methods. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/EdgeGAN.Comment: 40 pages, 29 figure

Edge Guided GANs with Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning for Semantic Image Synthesis

We propose a novel ECGAN for the challenging semantic image synthesis task. Although considerable improvements have been achieved by the community in the recent period, the quality of synthesized images is far from satisfactory due to three largely unresolved challenges. 1) The semantic labels do not provide detailed structural information, making it challenging to synthesize local details and structures; 2) The widely adopted CNN operations such as convolution, down-sampling, and normalization usually cause spatial resolution loss and thus cannot fully preserve the original semantic information, leading to semantically inconsistent results (e.g., missing small objects); 3) Existing semantic image synthesis methods focus on modeling 'local' semantic information from a single input semantic layout. However, they ignore 'global' semantic information of multiple input semantic layouts, i.e., semantic cross-relations between pixels across different input layouts. To tackle 1), we propose to use the edge as an intermediate representation which is further adopted to guide image generation via a proposed attention guided edge transfer module. To tackle 2), we design an effective module to selectively highlight class-dependent feature maps according to the original semantic layout to preserve the semantic information. To tackle 3), inspired by current methods in contrastive learning, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, which aims to enforce pixel embeddings belonging to the same semantic class to generate more similar image content than those from different classes. We further propose a novel multi-scale contrastive learning method that aims to push same-class features from different scales closer together being able to capture more semantic relations by explicitly exploring the structures of labeled pixels from multiple input semantic layouts from different scales.Comment: Accepted to TPAMI, an extended version of a paper published in ICLR2023. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2003.1389

Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination

In this study, we explore building a two-stage framework for enabling users to directly manipulate high-level attributes of a natural scene. The key to our approach is a deep generative network which can hallucinate images of a scene as if they were taken at a different season (e.g. during winter), weather condition (e.g. in a cloudy day) or time of the day (e.g. at sunset). Once the scene is hallucinated with the given attributes, the corresponding look is then transferred to the input image while preserving the semantic details intact, giving a photo-realistic manipulation result. As the proposed framework hallucinates what the scene will look like, it does not require any reference style image as commonly utilized in most of the appearance or style transfer approaches. Moreover, it allows to simultaneously manipulate a given scene according to a diverse set of transient attributes within a single model, eliminating the need of training multiple networks per each translation task. Our comprehensive set of qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach against the competing methods.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Graphic

Hierarchy Composition GAN for High-fidelity Image Synthesis

Despite the rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in image synthesis in recent years, the existing image synthesis approaches work in either geometry domain or appearance domain alone which often introduces various synthesis artifacts. This paper presents an innovative Hierarchical Composition GAN (HIC-GAN) that incorporates image synthesis in geometry and appearance domains into an end-to-end trainable network and achieves superior synthesis realism in both domains simultaneously. We design an innovative hierarchical composition mechanism that is capable of learning realistic composition geometry and handling occlusions while multiple foreground objects are involved in image composition. In addition, we introduce a novel attention mask mechanism that guides to adapt the appearance of foreground objects which also helps to provide better training reference for learning in geometry domain. Extensive experiments on scene text image synthesis, portrait editing and indoor rendering tasks show that the proposed HIC-GAN achieves superior synthesis performance qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Learning Compositional Visual Concepts with Mutual Consistency

Compositionality of semantic concepts in image synthesis and analysis is appealing as it can help in decomposing known and generatively recomposing unknown data. For instance, we may learn concepts of changing illumination, geometry or albedo of a scene, and try to recombine them to generate physically meaningful, but unseen data for training and testing. In practice however we often do not have samples from the joint concept space available: We may have data on illumination change in one data set and on geometric change in another one without complete overlap. We pose the following question: How can we learn two or more concepts jointly from different data sets with mutual consistency where we do not have samples from the full joint space? We present a novel answer in this paper based on cyclic consistency over multiple concepts, represented individually by generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our method, ConceptGAN, can be understood as a drop in for data augmentation to improve resilience for real world applications. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate its efficacy in generating semantically meaningful images, as well as one shot face verification as an example application.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, CVPR 201