Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders

Oord, Aaron van den, Kalchbrenner, Nal, Espeholt, Lasse, kavukcuoglu, koray, Vinyals, Oriol, Graves, Alex

Neural Information Processing Systems 

This work explores conditional image generation with a new image density model based on the PixelCNN architecture. The model can be conditioned on any vector, including descriptive labels or tags, or latent embeddings created by other networks. When conditioned on class labels from the ImageNet database, the model is able to generate diverse, realistic scenes representing distinct animals, objects, landscapes and structures. When conditioned on an embedding produced by a convolutional network given a single image of an unseen face, it generates a variety of new portraits of the same person with different facial expressions, poses and lighting conditions. We also show that conditional PixelCNN can serve as a powerful decoder in an image autoencoder.