No Arabic abstract
Kinship face synthesis is an interesting topic raised to answer questions like what will your future children look like?. Published approaches to this topic are limited. Most of the existing methods train models for one-versus-one kin relation, which only consider one parent face and one child face by directly using an auto-encoder without any explicit control over the resemblance of the synthesized face to the parent face. In this paper, we propose a novel method for controllable descendant face synthesis, which models two-versus-one kin relation between two parent faces and one child face. Our model consists of an inheritance module and an attribute enhancement module, where the former is designed for accurate control over the resemblance between the synthesized face and parent faces, and the latter is designed for control over age and gender. As there is no large scale database with father-mother-child kinship annotation, we propose an effective strategy to train the model without using the ground truth descendant faces. No carefully designed image pairs are required for learning except only age and gender labels of training faces. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations on three public benchmark databases, which demonstrates encouraging results.
Our ability to sample realistic natural images, particularly faces, has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, yet our ability to exert fine-tuned control over the generative process has lagged behind. If this new technology is to find practical uses, we need to achieve a level of control over generative networks which, without sacrificing realism, is on par with that seen in computer graphics and character animation. To this end we propose ConfigNet, a neural face model that allows for controlling individual aspects of output images in semantically meaningful ways and that is a significant step on the path towards finely-controllable neural rendering. ConfigNet is trained on real face images as well as synthetic face renders. Our novel method uses synthetic data to factorize the latent space into elements that correspond to the inputs of a traditional rendering pipeline, separating aspects such as head pose, facial expression, hair style, illumination, and many others which are very hard to annotate in real data. The real images, which are presented to the network without labels, extend the variety of the generated images and encourage realism. Finally, we propose an evaluation criterion using an attribute detection network combined with a user study and demonstrate state-of-the-art individual control over attributes in the output images.
A lifespan face synthesis (LFS) model aims to generate a set of photo-realistic face images of a persons whole life, given only one snapshot as reference. The generated face image given a target age code is expected to be age-sensitive reflected by bio-plausible transformations of shape and texture, while being identity preserving. This is extremely challenging because the shape and texture characteristics of a face undergo separate and highly nonlinear transformations w.r.t. age. Most recent LFS models are based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) whereby age code conditional transformations are applied to a latent face representation. They benefit greatly from the recent advancements of GANs. However, without explicitly disentangling their latent representations into the texture, shape and identity factors, they are fundamentally limited in modeling the nonlinear age-related transformation on texture and shape whilst preserving identity. In this work, a novel LFS model is proposed to disentangle the key face characteristics including shape, texture and identity so that the unique shape and texture age transformations can be modeled effectively. This is achieved by extracting shape, texture and identity features separately from an encoder. Critically, two transformation modules, one conditional convolution based and the other channel attention based, are designed for modeling the nonlinear shape and texture feature transformations respectively. This is to accommodate their rather distinct aging processes and ensure that our synthesized images are both age-sensitive and identity preserving. Extensive experiments show that our LFS model is clearly superior to the state-of-the-art alternatives. Codes and demo are available on our project website: url{https://senhe.github.io/projects/iccv_2021_lifespan_face}.
This presentation introduces a self-supervised learning approach to the synthesis of new video clips from old ones, with several new key elements for improved spatial resolution and realism: It conditions the synthesis process on contextual information for temporal continuity and ancillary information for fine control. The prediction model is doubly autoregressive, in the latent space of an autoencoder for forecasting, and in image space for updating contextual information, which is also used to enforce spatio-temporal consistency through a learnable optical flow module. Adversarial training of the autoencoder in the appearance and temporal domains is used to further improve the realism of its output. A quantizer inserted between the encoder and the transformer in charge of forecasting future frames in latent space (and its inverse inserted between the transformer and the decoder) adds even more flexibility by affording simple mechanisms for handling multimodal ancillary information for controlling the synthesis process (eg, a few sample frames, an audio track, a trajectory in image space) and taking into account the intrinsically uncertain nature of the future by allowing multiple predictions. Experiments with an implementation of the proposed approach give very good qualitative and quantitative results on multiple tasks and standard benchmarks.
Face attribute editing aims to generate faces with one or multiple desired face attributes manipulated while other details are preserved. Unlike prior works such as GAN inversion, which has an expensive reverse mapping process, we propose a simple feed-forward network to generate high-fidelity manipulated faces. By simply employing some existing and easy-obtainable prior information, our method can control, transfer, and edit diverse attributes of faces in the wild. The proposed method can consequently be applied to various applications such as face swapping, face relighting, and makeup transfer. In our method, we decouple identity, expression, pose, and illumination using 3D priors; separate texture and colors by using region-wise style codes. All the information is embedded into adversarial learning by our identity-style normalization module. Disentanglement losses are proposed to enhance the generator to extract information independently from each attribute. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations have been conducted. In a single framework, our method achieves the best or competitive scores on a variety of face applications.
We propose DiscoFaceGAN, an approach for face image generation of virtual people with disentangled, precisely-controllable latent representations for identity of non-existing people, expression, pose, and illumination. We embed 3D priors into adversarial learning and train the network to imitate the image formation of an analytic 3D face deformation and rendering process. To deal with the generation freedom induced by the domain gap between real and rendered faces, we further introduce contrastive learning to promote disentanglement by comparing pairs of generated images. Experiments show that through our imitative-contrastive learning, the factor variations are very well disentangled and the properties of a generated face can be precisely controlled. We also analyze the learned latent space and present several meaningful properties supporting factor disentanglement. Our method can also be used to embed real images into the disentangled latent space. We hope our method could provide new understandings of the relationship between physical properties and deep image synthesis.