MetalGAN: Multi-domain label-less image synthesis using cGANs and meta-learning.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
PMID:

Abstract

Image synthesis is currently one of the most addressed image processing topic in computer vision and deep learning fields of study. Researchers have tackled this problem focusing their efforts on its several challenging problems, e.g. image quality and size, domain and pose changing, architecture of the networks, and so on. Above all, producing images belonging to different domains by using a single architecture is a very relevant goal for image generation. In fact, a single multi-domain network would allow greater flexibility and robustness in the image synthesis task than other approaches. This paper proposes a novel architecture and a training algorithm, which are able to produce multi-domain outputs using a single network. A small portion of a dataset is intentionally used, and there are no hard-coded labels (or classes). This is achieved by combining a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for image generation and a Meta-Learning algorithm for domain switch, and we called our approach MetalGAN. The approach has proved to be appropriate for solving the multi-domain label-less problem and it is validated on facial attribute transfer, using CelebA dataset.

Authors

  • Tomaso Fontanini
    IMP Lab, Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze, 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy. Electronic address: tomaso.fontanini@studenti.unipr.it.
  • Eleonora Iotti
    IMP Lab, Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze, 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy.
  • Luca Donati
    IMP Lab, Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze, 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy.
  • Andrea Prati
    IMP Lab, Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze, 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy.