Detail Me More: Improving GAN's Photo-Realism of Complex Scenes

Raghudeep Gadde, Qianli Feng, Aleix M. Martinez; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 13950-13959

Generative models can synthesize photo-realistic images of a single object. For example, for human faces, algorithms learn to model the local shape and shading of the face components, i.e., changes in the brows, eyes, nose, mouth, jaw line, etc. This is possible because all faces have two brows, two eyes, a nose and a mouth, approximately in the same location. The modeling of complex scenes is however much more challenging because the scene components and their location vary from image to image. For example, living rooms contain a varying number of products belonging to many possible categories and locations, e.g., a lamp may or may not be present in an endless number of possible locations. In the present work, we propose to add a "broker" module in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to solve this problem. The broker is tasked to mediate the use of multiple discriminators in the appropriate image locales. For example, if a lamp is detected or wanted in a specific area of the scene, the broker assigns a fine-grained lamp discriminator to that image patch. This allows the generator to learn the shape and shading models of the lamp. The resulting multi-fine-grained optimization problem is able to synthesize complex scenes with almost the same level of photo-realism as single object images. We demonstrate the generability of the proposed approach on several GAN algorithms (BigGAN, ProGAN, StyleGAN, StyleGAN2), image resolutions (256x256 to 1024x1024), and datasets. Our approach yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art GAN algorithms.