BlendGAN: Implicitly GAN Blending for Arbitrary Stylized Face Generation
This addresses the challenge of flexible and efficient stylized face generation for applications in digital art and media, though it is incremental by building on existing GAN and blending techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating stylized faces with arbitrary styles using a single model, avoiding the need for style-specific training data, and demonstrates that BlendGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality and style diversity.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made a dramatic leap in high-fidelity image synthesis and stylized face generation. Recently, a layer-swapping mechanism has been developed to improve the stylization performance. However, this method is incapable of fitting arbitrary styles in a single model and requires hundreds of style-consistent training images for each style. To address the above issues, we propose BlendGAN for arbitrary stylized face generation by leveraging a flexible blending strategy and a generic artistic dataset. Specifically, we first train a self-supervised style encoder on the generic artistic dataset to extract the representations of arbitrary styles. In addition, a weighted blending module (WBM) is proposed to blend face and style representations implicitly and control the arbitrary stylization effect. By doing so, BlendGAN can gracefully fit arbitrary styles in a unified model while avoiding case-by-case preparation of style-consistent training images. To this end, we also present a novel large-scale artistic face dataset AAHQ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlendGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and style diversity for both latent-guided and reference-guided stylized face synthesis.