Attribute-Guided Sketch Generation

-- Facial attributes are important since they provide a detailed description and determine the visual appearance of human faces. In this paper, we aim at converting a face image to a sketch while simultaneously generating facial attributes. T o this end, we propose a novel Attribute-Guided Sketch Generative Adversarial Network (ASGAN) which is an end-to-end framework and contains two pairs of generators and discriminators, one of which is used to generate faces with attributes while the other one is employed for image-to-sketch translation. The two generators form a W-shaped network (W-net) and they are trained jointly with a weight-sharing constraint. Additionally, we also propose two novel discriminators, the residual one focusing on attribute generation and the triplex one helping to generate realistic looking sketches. T o validate our model, we have created a new large dataset with 8,804 images, named the Attribute Face Photo & Sketch (AFPS) dataset which is the first dataset containing attributes associated to face sketch images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network (i) generates more photo-realistic faces with sharper facial attributes than baselines and (ii) has good generalization capability on different generative tasks. Recently, there has been a new trend in computer vision to use machines to express the "creativity" of art. Novel and never-seen-before images can be generated by inverting the convolution process in CNN ("upconvolution" or "deconvolution"), which gives such networks the ability to "dream" [23] and to generate images.