No Arabic abstract
Despite significant recent progress on generative models, controlled generation of images depicting multiple and complex object layouts is still a difficult problem. Among the core challenges are the diversity of appearance a given object may possess and, as a result, exponential set of images consistent with a specified layout. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for layout-based image generation; we call it Layout2Im. Given the coarse spatial layout (bounding boxes + object categories), our model can generate a set of realistic images which have the correct objects in the desired locations. The representation of each object is disentangled into a specified/certain part (category) and an unspecified/uncertain part (appearance). The category is encoded using a word embedding and the appearance is distilled into a low-dimensional vector sampled from a normal distribution. Individual object representations are composed together using convolutional LSTM, to obtain an encoding of the complete layout, and then decoded to an image. Several loss terms are introduced to encourage accurate and diverse generation. The proposed Layout2Im model significantly outperforms the previous state of the art, boosting the best reported inception score by 24.66% and 28.57% on the very challenging COCO-Stuff and Visual Genome datasets, respectively. Extensive experiments also demonstrate our methods ability to generate complex and diverse images with multiple objects.
A layout to image (L2I) generation model aims to generate a complicated image containing multiple objects (things) against natural background (stuff), conditioned on a given layout. Built upon the recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), existing L2I models have made great progress. However, a close inspection of their generated images reveals two major limitations: (1) the object-to-object as well as object-to-stuff relations are often broken and (2) each objects appearance is typically distorted lacking the key defining characteristics associated with the object class. We argue that these are caused by the lack of context-aware object and stuff feature encoding in their generators, and location-sensitive appearance representation in their discriminators. To address these limitations, two new modules are proposed in this work. First, a context-aware feature transformation module is introduced in the generator to ensure that the generated feature encoding of either object or stuff is aware of other co-existing objects/stuff in the scene. Second, instead of feeding location-insensitive image features to the discriminator, we use the Gram matrix computed from the feature maps of the generated object images to preserve location-sensitive information, resulting in much enhanced object appearance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO-Thing-Stuff and Visual Genome benchmarks.
We introduce a learning framework for automated floorplan generation which combines generative modeling using deep neural networks and user-in-the-loop designs to enable human users to provide sparse design constraints. Such constraints are represented by a layout graph. The core component of our learning framework is a deep neural network, Graph2Plan, which converts a layout graph, along with a building boundary, into a floorplan that fulfills both the layout and boundary constraints. Given an input building boundary, we allow a user to specify room counts and other layout constraints, which are used to retrieve a set of floorplans, with their associated layout graphs, from a database. For each retrieved layout graph, along with the input boundary, Graph2Plan first generates a corresponding raster floorplan image, and then a refined set of boxes representing the rooms. Graph2Plan is trained on RPLAN, a large-scale dataset consisting of 80K annotated floorplans. The network is mainly based on convolutional processing over both the layout graph, via a graph neural network (GNN), and the input building boundary, as well as the raster floorplan images, via conventional image convolution.
The interest of the deep learning community in image synthesis has grown massively in recent years. Nowadays, deep generative methods, and especially Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are leading to state-of-the-art performance, capable of synthesizing images that appear realistic. While the efforts for improving the quality of the generated images are extensive, most attempts still consider the generator part as an uncorroborated black-box. In this paper, we aim to provide a better understanding and design of the image generation process. We interpret existing generators as implicitly relying on sparsity-inspired models. More specifically, we show that generators can be viewed as manifestations of the Convolutional Sparse Coding (CSC) and its Multi-Layered version (ML-CSC) synthesis processes. We leverage this observation by explicitly enforcing a sparsifying regularization on appropriately chosen activation layers in the generator, and demonstrate that this leads to improved image synthesis. Furthermore, we show that the same rationale and benefits apply to generators serving inverse problems, demonstrated on the Deep Image Prior (DIP) method.
In this paper, we address the novel, highly challenging problem of estimating the layout of a complex urban driving scenario. Given a single color image captured from a driving platform, we aim to predict the birds-eye view layout of the road and other traffic participants. The estimated layout should reason beyond what is visible in the image, and compensate for the loss of 3D information due to projection. We dub this problem amodal scene layout estimation, which involves hallucinating scene layout for even parts of the world that are occluded in the image. To this end, we present MonoLayout, a deep neural network for real-time amodal scene layout estimation from a single image. We represent scene layout as a multi-channel semantic occupancy grid, and leverage adversarial feature learning to hallucinate plausible completions for occluded image parts. Due to the lack of fair baseline methods, we extend several state-of-the-art approaches for road-layout estimation and vehicle occupancy estimation in birds-eye view to the amodal setup for rigorous evaluation. By leveraging temporal sensor fusion to generate training labels, we significantly outperform current art over a number of datasets. On the KITTI and Argoverse datasets, we outperform all baselines by a significant margin. We also make all our annotations, and code publicly available. A video abstract of this paper is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcroGyo6yRQ .
We present a versatile model, FaceAnime, for various video generation tasks from still images. Video generation from a single face image is an interesting problem and usually tackled by utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to integrate information from the input face image and a sequence of sparse facial landmarks. However, the generated face images usually suffer from quality loss, image distortion, identity change, and expression mismatching due to the weak representation capacity of the facial landmarks. In this paper, we propose to imagine a face video from a single face image according to the reconstructed 3D face dynamics, aiming to generate a realistic and identity-preserving face video, with precisely predicted pose and facial expression. The 3D dynamics reveal changes of the facial expression and motion, and can serve as a strong prior knowledge for guiding highly realistic face video generation. In particular, we explore face video prediction and exploit a well-designed 3D dynamic prediction network to predict a 3D dynamic sequence for a single face image. The 3D dynamics are then further rendered by the sparse texture mapping algorithm to recover structural details and sparse textures for generating face frames. Our model is versatile for various AR/VR and entertainment applications, such as face video retargeting and face video prediction. Superior experimental results have well demonstrated its effectiveness in generating high-fidelity, identity-preserving, and visually pleasant face video clips from a single source face image.