Expanding the Latent Space of StyleGAN for Real Face Editing
This work addresses a specific problem in computer vision for face editing applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of editing real face images with StyleGAN by expanding its latent space to break the trade-off between preserving input appearance and enabling meaningful manipulations, achieving improved performance in real face editing and reconstruction tasks.
Recently, a surge of face editing techniques have been proposed to employ the pretrained StyleGAN for semantic manipulation. To successfully edit a real image, one must first convert the input image into StyleGAN's latent variables. However, it is still challenging to find latent variables, which have the capacity for preserving the appearance of the input subject (e.g., identity, lighting, hairstyles) as well as enabling meaningful manipulations. In this paper, we present a method to expand the latent space of StyleGAN with additional content features to break down the trade-off between low-distortion and high-editability. Specifically, we proposed a two-branch model, where the style branch first tackles the entanglement issue by the sparse manipulation of latent codes, and the content branch then mitigates the distortion issue by leveraging the content and appearance details from the input image. We confirm the effectiveness of our method using extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on real face editing and reconstruction tasks.