Deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable success in image restoration and enhancement, but are they still competitive when there is a lack of paired training data? As one such example, this paper explores the low-light image enhancement problem, where in practice it is extremely challenging to simultaneously take a low-light and a normal-light photo of the same visual scene. We propose a highly effective unsupervised generative adversarial network, dubbed EnlightenGAN, that can be trained without low normal-light image pairs, yet proves to generalize very well on various real-world test images. Instead of supervising the learning using ground truth data, we propose to regularize the unpaired training using the information extracted from the input itself, and benchmark a series of innovations for the low-light image enhancement problem, including a global-local discriminator structure, a self-regularized perceptual loss fusion, and attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, our proposed approach outperforms recent methods under a variety of metrics in terms of visual quality and subjective user study. Thanks to the great flexibility brought by unpaired training, EnlightenGAN is demonstrated to be easily adaptable to enhancing real-world images from various domains. The code is available at this https URL
GANs @cite_20 have proven successful in image synthesis and translation. When applying GANs to image restoration and enhancement, most existing works use paired training data as well, such as super resolution @cite_37 , single image deblurring @cite_41 , deraining @cite_12 and dehazing @cite_46 . Several unsupervised GANs are proposed to learn inter-domain mappings using adversarial learning and are adopted for many other tasks. @cite_39 @cite_48 adopted a two-way GAN to translate between two different domains by using a cycle-consistent loss with unpaired data A handful of latest works followed their methodology and applied unpaired training with cycle-consistency to several low-level vision tasks, e.g. dehazing, deraining, super-resolution and mobile photo enhancement @cite_50 @cite_21 @cite_44 @cite_33 . Different from them, EnlightenGAN refers to unpaired training but with a lightweight one-path GAN structure (i.e., without cycle-consistency), which is stable and easy to train.
@cite_37 @cite_33 @cite_41 @cite_48 @cite_21 @cite_39 @cite_44 @cite_50 @cite_46 @cite_20 @cite_12
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Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for cross-domain image-to-image translation have made much progress recently [7, 8, 21, 12, 4, 18]. Depending on the task complexity, thousands to millions of labeled image pairs are needed to train a conditional GAN. However, human labeling is expensive, even impractical, and large quantities of data may not always be available. Inspired by dual learning from natural language translation [23], we develop a novel dual-GAN mechanism, which enables image translators to be trained from two sets of unlabeled images from two domains. In our architecture, the primal GAN learns to translate images from domain U to those in domain V, while the dual GAN learns to invert the task. The closed loop made by the primal and dual tasks allows images from either domain to be translated and then reconstructed. Hence a loss function that accounts for the reconstruction error of images can be used to train the translators. Experiments on multiple image translation tasks with unlabeled data show considerable performance gain of DualGAN over a single GAN. For some tasks, DualGAN can even achieve comparable or slightly better results than conditional GAN trained on fully labeled data. Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for cross-domain image-to-image translation have made much progress recently. Depending on the task complexity, thousands to millions of labeled image pairs are needed to train a conditional GAN. However, human labeling is expensive, even impractical, and large quantities of data may not always be available. Inspired by dual learning from natural language translation, we develop a novel dual-GAN mechanism, which enables image translators to be trained from two sets of unlabeled images from two domains. In our architecture, the primal GAN learns to translate images from domain U to those in domain V, while the dual GAN learns to invert the task. The closed loop made by the primal and dual tasks allows images from either domain to be translated and then reconstructed. Hence a loss function that accounts for the reconstruction error of images can be used to train the translators. Experiments on multiple image translation tasks with unlabeled data show considerable performance gain of DualGAN over a single GAN. For some tasks, DualGAN can even achieve comparable or slightly better results than conditional GAN trained on fully labeled data. This paper proposes an unpaired learning method for image enhancement. Given a set of photographs with the desired characteristics, the proposed method learns a photo enhancer which transforms an input image into an enhanced image with those characteristics. The method is based on the framework of two-way generative adversarial networks (GANs) with several improvements. First, we augment the U-Net with global features and show that it is more effective. The global U-Net acts as the generator in our GAN model. Second, we improve Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) with an adaptive weighting scheme. With this scheme, training converges faster and better, and is less sensitive to parameters than WGAN-GP. Finally, we propose to use individual batch normalization layers for generators in two-way GANs. It helps generators better adapt to their own input distributions. All together, they significantly improve the stability of GAN training for our application. Both quantitative and visual results show that the proposed method is effective for enhancing images. Despite the promising results on paired unpaired image-to-image translation achieved by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), prior works often only transfer the low-level information (e.g. color or texture changes), but fail to manipulate high-level semantic meanings (e.g., geometric structure or content) of different object regions. On the other hand, while some researches can synthesize compelling real-world images given a class label or caption, they cannot condition on arbitrary shapes or structures, which largely limits their application scenarios and interpretive capability of model results. In this work, we focus on a more challenging semantic manipulation task, aiming at modifying the semantic meaning of an object while preserving its own characteristics (e.g. viewpoints and shapes), such as cow ( )sheep, motor ( )bicycle, cat ( )dog. To tackle such large semantic changes, we introduce a contrasting GAN (contrast-GAN) with a novel adversarial contrasting objective which is able to perform all types of semantic translations with one category-conditional generator. Instead of directly making the synthesized samples close to target data as previous GANs did, our adversarial contrasting objective optimizes over the distance comparisons between samples, that is, enforcing the manipulated data be semantically closer to the real data with target category than the input data. Equipped with the new contrasting objective, a novel mask-conditional contrast-GAN architecture is proposed to enable disentangle image background with object semantic changes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on several semantic manipulation tasks on ImageNet and MSCOCO dataset show considerable performance gain by our contrast-GAN over other conditional GANs.