BachGAN: High-Resolution Image Synthesis From Salient Object Layout

Yandong Li, Yu Cheng, Zhe Gan, Licheng Yu, Liqiang Wang, Jingjing Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 8365-8374

We propose a new task towards more practical applications for image generation - high-quality image synthesis from salient object layout. This new setting requires users to provide only the layout of salient objects (i.e., foreground bounding boxes and categories) and lets the model complete the drawing with an invented background and a matching foreground. Two main challenges spring from this new task: (i) how to generate fine-grained details and realistic textures without segmentation map input; and (ii) how to create and weave a background into standalone objects in a seamless way. To tackle this, we propose Background Hallucination Generative Adversarial Network (BachGAN), which leverages a background retrieval module to first select a set of segmentation maps from a large candidate pool, then encodes these candidate layouts via a background fusion module to hallucinate a suitable background for the given objects. By generating the hallucinated background representation dynamically, our model can synthesize high-resolution images with both photo-realistic foreground and integral background. Experiments on Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets demonstrate the advantage of BachGAN over existing approaches, measured on both visual fidelity of generated images and visual alignment between output images and input layouts.