CVC has a new PhD on its record!

Abstract:

Image generation is arguably one of the most attractive, compelling, and challenging tasks in computer vision. Among the methods which perform image generation, generative adversarial networks (GANs) play a key role. The most common image generation models based on GANs can be divided into two main approaches. The first one, called simply image generation takes random noise as an input and synthesizes an image which follows the same distribution as the images in the training set. The second class, which is called image-to-image translation, aims to map an image from a source domain to one that is indistinguishable from those in the target domain. Image-to-image translation methods can further be divided into paired and unpaired image-to-image translation based on whether they require paired data or not. In this thesis, we aim to address some challenges of both image generation and image-to-image generation.

GANs highly rely upon having access to vast quantities of data, and fail to generate realistic images from random noise when applied to domains with few images. To address this problem, we aim to transfer knowledge from a model trained on a large dataset (source domain) to the one learned on limited data (target domain). We find that both GANs andconditional GANs can benefit from models trained on large datasets. Our experiments show that transferring the discriminator is more important than the generator. Using both the generator and discriminator results in the best performance. We found, however, that this method suffers from overfitting, since we update all parameters to adapt to the target data. We propose a novel architecture, which is tailored to address knowledge transfer to very small target domains. Our approach effectively exploreswhich part of the latent space is more related to the target domain. Additionally, the proposed method is able to transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs.

Although image-to-image translation has achieved outstanding performance, it still facesseveral problems. First, for translation between complex domains (such as translations between different modalities) image-to-image translation methods require paired data. We show that when only some of the pairwise translations have been seen (i.e. during training), we can infer the remaining unseen translations (where training pairs are not available). We propose a new approach where we align multiple encoders and decoders in such a way that the desired translation can be obtained by simply cascadingthe source encoder and the target decoder, even when they have not interacted during the training stage (i.e. unseen). Second, we address the issue of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets unavoidably contain undesired changes, which are dueto the fact that the target dataset has a particular underlying visual distribution. We use carefully designed semantic constraints to reduce the effects of the bias. The semantic constraint aims to enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Finally, current approaches fail to generate diverse outputs or perform scalable image transfer in a single model. To alleviate this problem, we propose a scalable and diverse image-to-image translation. We employ random noise to control the diversity. The scalabitlity is determined by conditioning the domain label.computer vision, deep learning, imitation learning, adversarial generative networks, image generation, image-to-image translation.

Keywords: computer vision, deep learning, imitation learning, adversarial generative networks, image generation, image-to-image translation.

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