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