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A novel attribute-based generation architecture for facial image editing

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Abstract

Facial image editing is one of the hot topics in recent years due to the great development in deep generative models. Current models are either based on variational autoencoder(VAE) or generative adversarial network(GAN). However, VAE-based models usually generate oversmooth images, while GAN-based-only models cannot randomly generate images with specific attributes and suffer from unstable training. To overcome these limitations, a novel attribute-disentangled generative model based on the combination of VAE and GAN is proposed for facial image editing by manipulating specific attributes and synthesizing facial images conditioned on the specified attributes. In the encoder-decoder architecture of the proposed model, the latent space mapped by the encoder is split into two subspaces: the attribute-irrelevant space and the attribute-relevant space. The attribute-irrelevant space characterizes the factors such as identity, position, background etc, which are expected to be kept unchanged during the editing. The attribute-relevant space is used to represent the attributes such as hair color, gender, age etc that we want to manipulate. We use the adversarial training scheme to train the model, where images generated by the proposed model are re-feeded to the encoder to ensure their distribution is close to the real data distribution in the attribute-irrelevant subspace while they can be correctly classified in the attribute-relevant subspace, without explicitly giving the discriminators such as in GANs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the proposed model and other state-of-the-art algorithms were tesed on the CelebA dataset. The evaluation results show that the proposed model can effectively generate high-quality facial images with diverse specified attributes.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Natural Science Foundation of China under grants numbers 61673018, 61272338, 61703443 and Guangzhou Science and Technology Founding Committee under grant No. 201707010222 and Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Computer Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Defang Li, Min Zhang, Weifu Chen & Guocan Feng

  2. Guangdong Province Key Laboratory, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Defang Li, Min Zhang, Weifu Chen & Guocan Feng

  3. School of Computer Science and Technology, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan, China

    Lifang Zhang

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  1. Defang Li
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  2. Min Zhang
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Correspondence to Weifu Chen.

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Li, D., Zhang, M., Zhang, L. et al. A novel attribute-based generation architecture for facial image editing. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 4881–4902 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09858-7

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