Given an arbitrary face image and an arbitrary speech clip, the proposed work attempts to generating the talking face video with accurate lip synchronization while maintaining smooth transition of both lip and facial movement over the entire video clip. Existing works either do not consider temporal dependency on face images across different video frames thus easily yielding noticeable abrupt facial and lip movement or are only limited to the generation of talking face video for a specific person thus lacking generalization capacity. We propose a novel conditional video generation network where the audio input is treated as a condition for the recurrent adversarial network such that temporal dependency is incorporated to realize smooth transition for the lip and facial movement. In addition, we deploy a multi-task adversarial training scheme in the context of video generation to improve both photo-realism and the accuracy for lip synchronization. Finally, based on the phoneme distribution information extracted from the audio clip, we develop a sample selection method that effectively reduces the size of the training dataset without sacrificing the quality of the generated video. Extensive experiments on both controlled and uncontrolled datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of visual quality, lip sync accuracy, and smooth transition of lip and facial movement, as compared to the state-of-the-art.
@cite_30: We start by asking an interesting yet challenging question, "If an eyewitness can only recall the eye features of the suspect, such that the forensic artist can only produce a sketch of the eyes (e.g., the top-left sketch shown in Fig. 1), can advanced computer vision techniques help generate the whole face image?" A more generalized question is that if a large proportion (e.g., more than 50 ) of the face sketch is missing, can a realistic whole face sketch image still be estimated. Existing face completion and generation methods either do not conduct domain transfer learning or can not handle large missing area. For example, the inpainting approach tends to blur the generated region when the missing area is large (i.e., more than 50 ). In this paper, we exploit the potential of deep learning networks in filling large missing region (e.g., as high as 95 missing) and generating realistic faces with high-fidelity in cross domains. We propose the recursive generation by bidirectional transformation networks (r-BTN) that recursively generates a whole face sketch from a small sketch face patch. The large missing area and the cross domain challenge make it difficult to generate satisfactory results using a unidirectional cross-domain learning structure. On the other hand, a forward and backward bidirectional learning between the face and sketch domains would enable recursive estimation of the missing region in an incremental manner (Fig. 1) and yield appealing results. r-BTN also adopts an adversarial constraint to encourage the generation of realistic faces sketches. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superior performance from r-BTN as compared to existing potential solutions.
@cite_18: Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly compelling images of specific categories, such as faces, album covers, and room interiors. In this work, we develop a novel deep architecture and GAN formulation to effectively bridge these advances in text and image modeling, translating visual concepts from characters to pixels. We demonstrate the capability of our model to generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions.
@cite_26: We present an unsupervised visual feature learning algorithm driven by context-based pixel prediction. By analogy with auto-encoders, we propose Context Encoders – a convolutional neural network trained to generate the contents of an arbitrary image region conditioned on its surroundings. In order to succeed at this task, context encoders need to both understand the content of the entire image, as well as produce a plausible hypothesis for the missing part(s). When training context encoders, we have experimented with both a standard pixel-wise reconstruction loss, as well as a reconstruction plus an adversarial loss. The latter produces much sharper results because it can better handle multiple modes in the output. We found that a context encoder learns a representation that captures not just appearance but also the semantics of visual structures. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned features for CNN pre-training on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, context encoders can be used for semantic inpainting tasks, either stand-alone or as initialization for non-parametric methods.
@cite_4: Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing textto- image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256.256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions.
@cite_22: If I provide you a face image of mine (without telling you the actual age when I took the picture) and a large amount of face images that I crawled (containing labeled faces of different ages but not necessarily paired), can you show me what I would look like when I am 80 or what I was like when I was 5? The answer is probably a No. Most existing face aging works attempt to learn the transformation between age groups and thus would require the paired samples as well as the labeled query image. In this paper, we look at the problem from a generative modeling perspective such that no paired samples is required. In addition, given an unlabeled image, the generative model can directly produce the image with desired age attribute. We propose a conditional adversarial autoencoder (CAAE) that learns a face manifold, traversing on which smooth age progression and regression can be realized simultaneously. In CAAE, the face is first mapped to a latent vector through a convolutional encoder, and then the vector is projected to the face manifold conditional on age through a deconvolutional generator. The latent vector preserves personalized face features (i.e., personality) and the age condition controls progression vs. regression. Two adversarial networks are imposed on the encoder and generator, respectively, forcing to generate more photo-realistic faces. Experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of the proposed framework by comparing with the state-of-the-art and ground truth.
@cite_8: Image-to-image translation is a class of vision and graphics problems where the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a training set of aligned image pairs. However, for many tasks, paired training data will not be available. We present an approach for learning to translate an image from a source domain X to a target domain Y in the absence of paired examples. Our goal is to learn a mapping G : X → Y such that the distribution of images from G(X) is indistinguishable from the distribution Y using an adversarial loss. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we couple it with an inverse mapping F : Y → X and introduce a cycle consistency loss to push F(G(X)) ≈ X (and vice versa). Qualitative results are presented on several tasks where paired training data does not exist, including collection style transfer, object transfiguration, season transfer, photo enhancement, etc. Quantitative comparisons against several prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
@cite_9: We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Indeed, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, a large number of internet users (many of them artists) have posted their own experiments with our system, further demonstrating its wide applicability and ease of adoption without the need for parameter tweaking. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.
@cite_29: Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.
@cite_3: Incorporating encoding-decoding nets with adversarial nets has been widely adopted in image generation tasks. We observe that the state-of-the-art achievements were obtained by carefully balancing the reconstruction loss and adversarial loss, and such balance shifts with different network structures, datasets, and training strategies. Empirical studies have demonstrated that an inappropriate weight between the two losses may cause instability, and it is tricky to search for the optimal setting, especially when lacking prior knowledge on the data and network. This paper gives the first attempt to relax the need of manual balancing by proposing the concept of , where a novel network structure is designed that explicitly disentangles the backpropagation paths of the two losses. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and generality of the proposed method. The other contribution of the paper is the design of a new evaluation metric to measure the image quality of generative models. We propose the so-called (NRDS), which introduces the idea of relative comparison, rather than providing absolute estimates like existing metrics.
@cite_11: Due to the significant information loss in low-resolution (LR) images, it has become extremely challenging to further advance the state-of-the-art of single image super-resolution (SISR). Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR), on the other hand, has proven to be promising in recovering high-resolution (HR) details when a reference (Ref) image with similar content as that of the LR input is given. However, the quality of RefSR can degrade severely when Ref is less similar. This paper aims to unleash the potential of RefSR by leveraging more texture details from Ref images with stronger robustness even when irrelevant Ref images are provided. Inspired by the recent work on image stylization, we formulate the RefSR problem as neural texture transfer. We design an end-to-end deep model which enriches HR details by adaptively transferring the texture from Ref images according to their textural similarity. Instead of matching content in the raw pixel space as done by previous methods, our key contribution is a multi-level matching conducted in the neural space. This matching scheme facilitates multi-scale neural transfer that allows the model to benefit more from those semantically related Ref patches, and gracefully degrade to SISR performance on the least relevant Ref inputs. We build a benchmark dataset for the general research of RefSR, which contains Ref images paired with LR inputs with varying levels of similarity. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art.
Generative adversarial network (GAN) @cite_11 was first proposed in 2014 by Goodfellow which is able to generate photo-realistic images and has gained extraordinary popularity within recent two years. Compared with other generative models, such as variational autoencoder (VAE), GAN can generate much sharper and more photo-realistic images. Compared with the vanilla GAN, condition GANs can generate images under controllable factors rather than generating images from random noise. For example, Pix2pix @cite_9 and CycleGAN @cite_8 generated images with different color, style, and content conditioning on given reference images. CAAE related works @cite_22 @cite_3 generated face with aging effect conditioning on different age labels. SRGAN @cite_29 generated super-resolution images conditioning on low resolution images. @cite_26 @cite_30 filled in the incomplete holes of an image conditioning on the surrounding pixels. Most aforementioned works conduct image generation or translation within the same modality ( image modality). Few works conducted image generation between different modalities with large variations. For example, the text to image generation works @cite_18 @cite_4 synthesized image content based on given text description. @cite_29 predicted instrument images by providing the music audio played by some instruments.