GP-GAN: Gender Preserving GAN for Synthesizing Faces from Landmarks

Facial landmarks constitute the most compressed representation of faces and are known to preserve information such as pose, gender and facial structure present in the faces. Several works exist that attempt to perform high-level face-related analysis tasks based on landmarks. In contrast, in this work, an attempt is made to tackle the inverse problem of synthesizing faces from their respective landmarks. The primary aim of this work is to demonstrate that information preserved by landmarks (gender in particular) can be further accentuated by leveraging generative models to synthesize corresponding faces. Though the problem is particularly challenging due to its ill-posed nature, we believe that successful synthesis will enable several applications such as boosting performance of high-level face related tasks using landmark points and performing dataset augmentation. To this end, a novel face-synthesis method known as Gender Preserving Generative Adversarial Network (GP-GAN) that is guided by adversarial loss, perceptual loss and a gender preserving loss is presented. Further, we propose a novel generator sub-network UDeNet for GP-GAN that leverages advantages of U-Net and DenseNet architectures. Extensive experiments and comparison with recent methods are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, this paper is accepted as 2018 24th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2018

Towards explainable face aging with Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are being increasingly used to perform face aging due to their capabilities of automatically generating highly-realistic synthetic images by using an adversarial model often based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, GANs currently represent black box models since it is not known how the CNNs store and process the information learned from data. In this paper, we propose the \ufb01rst method that deals with explaining GANs, by introducing a novel qualitative and quantitative analysis of the inner structure of the model. Similarly to analyzing the common genes in two DNA sequences, we analyze the common \ufb01lters in two CNNs. We show that the GANs for face aging partially share their parameters with GANs trained for heterogeneous applications and that the aging transformation can be learned using general purpose image databases and a \ufb01ne-tuning step. Results on public databases con\ufb01rm the validity of our approach, also enabling future studies on similar models