High-Quality Facial Photo-Sketch Synthesis Using Multi-Adversarial Networks
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in computer vision for applications like law enforcement or entertainment, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN-based approaches.
The paper tackles the challenging problem of synthesizing high-resolution face sketches from photos and vice versa by proposing a multi-adversarial network framework that iteratively refines images from low to high resolution, achieving superior performance in image quality and matching compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Synthesizing face sketches from real photos and its inverse have many applications. However, photo/sketch synthesis remains a challenging problem due to the fact that photo and sketch have different characteristics. In this work, we consider this task as an image-to-image translation problem and explore the recently popular generative models (GANs) to generate high-quality realistic photos from sketches and sketches from photos. Recent GAN-based methods have shown promising results on image-to-image translation problems and photo-to-sketch synthesis in particular, however, they are known to have limited abilities in generating high-resolution realistic images. To this end, we propose a novel synthesis framework called Photo-Sketch Synthesis using Multi-Adversarial Networks, (PS2-MAN) that iteratively generates low resolution to high resolution images in an adversarial way. The hidden layers of the generator are supervised to first generate lower resolution images followed by implicit refinement in the network to generate higher resolution images. Furthermore, since photo-sketch synthesis is a coupled/paired translation problem, we leverage the pair information using CycleGAN framework. Both Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Photo-Sketch Matching experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in comparison to existing state-of-the-art solutions. Code available at: https://github.com/lidan1/PhotoSketchMAN.