Texture Synthesis Through Convolutional Neural Networks and Spectrum Constraints

This paper presents a significant improvement for the synthesis of texture images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), making use of constraints on the Fourier spectrum of the results. More precisely, the texture synthesis is regarded as a constrained optimization problem, with constraints conditioning both the Fourier spectrum and statistical features learned by CNNs. In contrast with existing methods, the presented method inherits from previous CNN approaches the ability to depict local structures and fine scale details, and at the same time yields coherent large scale structures, even in the case of quasi-periodic images. This is done at no extra computational cost. Synthesis experiments on various images show a clear improvement compared to a recent state-of-the art method relying on CNN constraints only

On Using Backpropagation for Speech Texture Generation and Voice Conversion

Inspired by recent work on neural network image generation which rely on backpropagation towards the network inputs, we present a proof-of-concept system for speech texture synthesis and voice conversion based on two mechanisms: approximate inversion of the representation learned by a speech recognition neural network, and on matching statistics of neuron activations between different source and target utterances. Similar to image texture synthesis and neural style transfer, the system works by optimizing a cost function with respect to the input waveform samples. To this end we use a differentiable mel-filterbank feature extraction pipeline and train a convolutional CTC speech recognition network. Our system is able to extract speaker characteristics from very limited amounts of target speaker data, as little as a few seconds, and can be used to generate realistic speech babble or reconstruct an utterance in a different voice.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201

Perception Driven Texture Generation

This paper investigates a novel task of generating texture images from perceptual descriptions. Previous work on texture generation focused on either synthesis from examples or generation from procedural models. Generating textures from perceptual attributes have not been well studied yet. Meanwhile, perceptual attributes, such as directionality, regularity and roughness are important factors for human observers to describe a texture. In this paper, we propose a joint deep network model that combines adversarial training and perceptual feature regression for texture generation, while only random noise and user-defined perceptual attributes are required as input. In this model, a preliminary trained convolutional neural network is essentially integrated with the adversarial framework, which can drive the generated textures to possess given perceptual attributes. An important aspect of the proposed model is that, if we change one of the input perceptual features, the corresponding appearance of the generated textures will also be changed. We design several experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can produce high quality texture images with desired perceptual properties.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, icme201