CookGAN: Causality Based Text-to-Image Synthesis

Bin Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 5519-5527

This paper addresses the problem of text-to-image synthesis from a new perspective, i.e., the cause-and-effect chain in image generation. Causality is a common phenomenon in cooking. The dish appearance changes depending on the cooking actions and ingredients. The challenge of synthesis is that a generated image should depict the visual result of action-on-object. This paper presents a new network architecture, CookGAN, that mimics visual effect in causality chain, preserves fine-grained details and progressively upsamples image. Particularly, a cooking simulator sub-network is proposed to incrementally make changes to food images based on the interaction between ingredients and cooking methods over a series of steps. Experiments on Recipe1M verify that CookGAN manages to generate food images with reasonably impressive inception score. Furthermore, the images are semantically interpretable and manipulable.