SSCGAN: Facial Attribute Editing via Style Skip Connections

Wenqing Chu, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Rongrong Ji ;

Existing facial attribute editing methods typically employ an encoder-decoder architecture where the attribute information is expressed as a conditional one-hot vector spatially concatenated with the image or intermediate feature maps. However, such operations only learn the local semantic mapping but ignore global facial statistics. In this work, we focus on solving this issue by editing the channel-wise global information denoted as the style feature. We develop a style skip connection based generative adversarial network, referred to as SSCGAN which enables accurate facial attribute manipulation. Specifically, we inject the target attribute information into multiple style skip connection paths between the encoder and decoder. Each connection extracts the style feature of the latent feature maps in the encoder and then performs a residual learning based mapping function in the global information space guided by the target attributes. In the following, the adjusted style feature will be utilized as the conditional information for instance normalization to transform the corresponding latent feature maps in the decoder. In addition, to avoid the vanishing of spatial details ( extit{e.g.} hairstyle or pupil locations), we further introduce the skip connection based spatial information transfer module. Through the global-wise style and local-wise spatial information manipulation, the proposed method can produce better results in terms of attribute generation accuracy and image quality. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods."