Attribute-controlled face photo synthesis from simple line drawing
This addresses the need for more controllable and generalizable face synthesis tools for applications in graphics and design, representing an incremental improvement over prior deep learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of synthesizing face photos from simple line drawings with user control over attributes like hair color and complexion, achieving photorealistic results and style transfer capabilities.
Face photo synthesis from simple line drawing is a one-to-many task as simple line drawing merely contains the contour of human face. Previous exemplar-based methods are over-dependent on the datasets and are hard to generalize to complicated natural scenes. Recently, several works utilize deep neural networks to increase the generalization, but they are still limited in the controllability of the users. In this paper, we propose a deep generative model to synthesize face photo from simple line drawing controlled by face attributes such as hair color and complexion. In order to maximize the controllability of face attributes, an attribute-disentangled variational auto-encoder (AD-VAE) is firstly introduced to learn latent representations disentangled with respect to specified attributes. Then we conduct photo synthesis from simple line drawing based on AD-VAE. Experiments show that our model can well disentangle the variations of attributes from other variations of face photos and synthesize detailed photorealistic face images with desired attributes. Regarding background and illumination as the style and human face as the content, we can also synthesize face photos with the target style of a style photo.