Controllable Multi-domain Semantic Artwork Synthesis

We present a novel framework for multi-domain synthesis of artwork from semantic layouts. One of the main limitations of this challenging task is the lack of publicly available segmentation datasets for art synthesis. To address this problem, we propose a dataset, which we call ArtSem, that contains 40,000 images of artwork from 4 different domains with their corresponding semantic label maps. We generate the dataset by first extracting semantic maps from landscape photography and then propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based approach to generate high-quality artwork from the semantic maps without necessitating paired training data. Furthermore, we propose an artwork synthesis model that uses domain-dependent variational encoders for high-quality multi-domain synthesis. The model is improved and complemented with a simple but effective normalization method, based on normalizing both the semantic and style jointly, which we call Spatially STyle-Adaptive Normalization (SSTAN). In contrast to previous methods that only take semantic layout as input, our model is able to learn a joint representation of both style and semantic information, which leads to better generation quality for synthesizing artistic images. Results indicate that our model learns to separate the domains in the latent space, and thus, by identifying the hyperplanes that separate the different domains, we can also perform fine-grained control of the synthesized artwork. By combining our proposed dataset and approach, we are able to generate user-controllable artwork that is of higher quality than existingComment: 15 pages, accepted by CVMJ, to appea

Recovering Faces from Portraits with Auxiliary Facial Attributes

Recovering a photorealistic face from an artistic portrait is a challenging task since crucial facial details are often distorted or completely lost in artistic compositions. To handle this loss, we propose an Attribute-guided Face Recovery from Portraits (AFRP) that utilizes a Face Recovery Network (FRN) and a Discriminative Network (DN). FRN consists of an autoencoder with residual block-embedded skip-connections and incorporates facial attribute vectors into the feature maps of input portraits at the bottleneck of the autoencoder. DN has multiple convolutional and fully-connected layers, and its role is to enforce FRN to generate authentic face images with corresponding facial attributes dictated by the input attribute vectors. %Leveraging on the spatial transformer networks, FRN automatically compensates for misalignments of portraits. % and generates aligned face images. For the preservation of identities, we impose the recovered and ground-truth faces to share similar visual features. Specifically, DN determines whether the recovered image looks like a real face and checks if the facial attributes extracted from the recovered image are consistent with given attributes. %Our method can recover high-quality photorealistic faces from unaligned portraits while preserving the identity of the face images as well as it can reconstruct a photorealistic face image with a desired set of attributes. Our method can recover photorealistic identity-preserving faces with desired attributes from unseen stylized portraits, artistic paintings, and hand-drawn sketches. On large-scale synthesized and sketch datasets, we demonstrate that our face recovery method achieves state-of-the-art results.Comment: 2019 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV