Attention-GAN for Object Transfiguration in Wild Images

Xinyuan Chen, Chang Xu, Xiaokang Yang, Dacheng Tao; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 164-180

This paper studies the object transfiguration problem in wild images. The generative network in classical GANs for object transfiguration often undertakes a dual responsibility: to detect the objects of interests and to convert the object from source domain to another domain. In contrast, we decompose the generative network into two separated networks, each of which is only dedicated to one particular sub-task. The attention network predicts spatial attention maps of images, and the transformation network focuses on translating objects. Attention maps produced by attention network are encouraged to be sparse, so that major attention can be paid on objects of interests. No matter before or after object transfiguration, attention maps should remain constant. In addition, learning attention network can receive more instruction, given the available segmentation annotations of images. Experimental results demonstrate the necessity of investigating attention in object transfiguration, and that the proposed algorithm can learn accurate attention to improve quality of generated images.