text: Generative Adversarial Networks have shown impressive results for the task of object translation, including face-to-face translation. A key component behind the success of recent approaches is the self-consistency loss, which encourages a network to recover the original input image when the output generated for a desired attribute is itself passed through the same network, but with the target attribute inverted. While the self-consistency loss yields photo-realistic results, it can be shown that the input and target domains, supposed to be close, differ substantially. This is empirically found by observing that a network recovers the input image even if attributes other than the inversion of the original goal are set as target. This stops one combining networks for different tasks, or using a network to do progressive forward passes. In this paper, we show empirical evidence of this effect, and propose a new loss to bridge the gap between the distributions of the input and target domains. This "triple consistency loss", aims to minimise the distance between the outputs generated by the network for different routes to the target, independent of any intermediate steps. To show this is effective, we incorporate the triple consistency loss into the training of a new landmark-guided face to face synthesis, where, contrary to previous works, the generated images can simultaneously undergo a large transformation in both expression and pose. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle the problem of mismatching distributions in self-domain synthesis, and to propose "in-the-wild" landmark-guided synthesis. Code will be available at this https URL
  @cite_25: Photorealistic frontal view synthesis from a single face image has a wide range of applications in the field of face recognition. Although data-driven deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem by seeking solutions from ample face data, this problem is still challenging because it is intrinsically ill-posed. This paper proposes a Two-Pathway Generative Adversarial Network (TP-GAN) for photorealistic frontal view synthesis by simultaneously perceiving global structures and local details. Four landmark located patch networks are proposed to attend to local textures in addition to the commonly used global encoderdecoder network. Except for the novel architecture, we make this ill-posed problem well constrained by introducing a combination of adversarial loss, symmetry loss and identity preserving loss. The combined loss function leverages both frontal face distribution and pre-trained discriminative deep face models to guide an identity preserving inference of frontal views from profiles. Different from previous deep learning methods that mainly rely on intermediate features for recognition, our method directly leverages the synthesized identity preserving image for downstream tasks like face recognition and attribution estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only presents compelling perceptual results but also outperforms state-of-theart results on large pose face recognition.
  @cite_17: Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for task of facial expression synthesis. The most successful architecture is StarGAN, that conditions GANs’ generation process with images of a specific domain, namely a set of images of persons sharing the same expression. While effective, this approach can only generate a discrete number of expressions, determined by the content of the dataset. To address this limitation, in this paper, we introduce a novel GAN conditioning scheme based on Action Units (AU) annotations, which describes in a continuous manifold the anatomical facial movements defining a human expression. Our approach allows controlling the magnitude of activation of each AU and combine several of them. Additionally, we propose a fully unsupervised strategy to train the model, that only requires images annotated with their activated AUs, and exploit attention mechanisms that make our network robust to changing backgrounds and lighting conditions. Extensive evaluation show that our approach goes beyond competing conditional generators both in the capability to synthesize a much wider range of expressions ruled by anatomically feasible muscle movements, as in the capacity of dealing with images in the wild.
summary: Most of the methods mentioned above apply a self-consistency loss to preserve identity. As shown in Fig. , this loss limits existing methods to one-to-one mappings, and render generated images that are unable to be used as the basis for generating further images. These methods might leave a neutral face to a given expression @cite_17 , or a non-frontal face to a frontal one @cite_25 . In either case, the network is not required to perform more than one forward pass from a given image. Thus, a self-consistency loss is applied to either preserve appearance or identity. While this yields impressive results, it causes a mismatch between the input and target distributions, when a desired property would be to actually make them match. As we shall see, our proposed GANnotation does have this property, and thanks to that .