Style transfer usually refers to the task of applying color and texture information from a specific style image to a given content image while preserving the structure of the latter. Here we tackle the more generic problem of semantic style transfer: given two unpaired collections of images, we aim to learn a mapping between the corpus-level style of each collection, while preserving semantic content shared across the two domains. We introduce XGAN ("Cross-GAN"), a dual adversarial autoencoder, which captures a shared representation of the common domain semantic content in an unsupervised way, while jointly learning the domain-to-domain image translations in both directions. We exploit ideas from the domain adaptation literature and define a semantic consistency loss which encourages the model to preserve semantics in the learned embedding space. We report promising qualitative results for the task of face-to-cartoon translation. The cartoon dataset we collected for this purpose will also be released as a new benchmark for semantic style transfer.
relies on learning a shared feature representation of both domains in an unsupervised setting to capture semantic rather than pixel information. For this purpose, we make use of the domain-adversarial training scheme @cite_4 . Moreover, recent domain adaptation work @cite_12 @cite_0 @cite_2 can be framed as semantic style transfer as they tackle the problem of mapping synthetic images, easy to generate, to natural images, which are more difficult to obtain. The generated samples are then used to train a model later applied to natural images. Contrary to our work however, they only consider pixel-level transformations.
@cite_0 @cite_4 @cite_12 @cite_2
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The recent advances in deep neural networks have convincingly demonstrated high capability in learning vision models on large datasets. Nevertheless, collecting expert labeled datasets especially with pixel-level annotations is an extremely expensive process. An appealing alternative is to render synthetic data (e.g., computer games) and generate ground truth automatically. However, simply applying the models learnt on synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to domain shift. In this paper, we facilitate this issue from the perspectives of both visual appearance-level and representation-level domain adaptation. The former adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the "style" in the target domain and the latter attempts to learn domain-invariant representations. Specifically, we present Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks (FCAN), a novel deep architecture for semantic segmentation which combines Appearance Adaptation Networks (AAN) and Representation Adaptation Networks (RAN). AAN learns a transformation from one domain to the other in the pixel space and RAN is optimized in an adversarial learning manner to maximally fool the domain discriminator with the learnt source and target representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on the transfer from GTA5 (game videos) to Cityscapes (urban street scenes) on semantic segmentation and our proposal achieves superior results when comparing to state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation techniques. More remarkably, we obtain a new record: mIoU of 47.5 on BDDS (drive-cam videos) in an unsupervised setting. The recent advances in deep neural networks have convincingly demonstrated high capability in learning vision models on large datasets. Nevertheless, collecting expert labeled datasets especially with pixel-level annotations is an extremely expensive process. An appealing alternative is to render synthetic data (e.g., computer games) and generate ground truth automatically. However, simply applying the models learnt on synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to domain shift. In this paper, we facilitate this issue from the perspectives of both visual appearance-level and representation-level domain adaptation. The former adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the "style" in the target domain and the latter attempts to learn domain-invariant representations. Specifically, we present Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks (FCAN), a novel deep architecture for semantic segmentation which combines Appearance Adaptation Networks (AAN) and Representation Adaptation Networks (RAN). AAN learns a transformation from one domain to the other in the pixel space and RAN is optimized in an adversarial learning manner to maximally fool the domain discriminator with the learnt source and target representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on the transfer from GTA5 (game videos) to Cityscapes (urban street scenes) on semantic segmentation and our proposal achieves superior results when comparing to state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation techniques. More remarkably, we obtain a new record: mIoU of 47.5 on BDDS (drive-cam videos) in an unsupervised setting. Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that have tried to either map representations between the two domains, or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we approach the problem in a new light by learning in an unsupervised manner a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. The effectiveness of generative adversarial approaches in producing images according to a specific style or visual domain has recently opened new directions to solve the unsupervised domain adaptation problem. It has been shown that source labeled images can be modified to mimic target samples making it possible to train directly a classifier in the target domain, despite the original lack of annotated data. Inverse mappings from the target to the source domain have also been evaluated but only passing through adapted feature spaces, thus without new image generation. In this paper we propose to better exploit the potential of generative adversarial networks for adaptation by introducing a novel symmetric mapping among domains. We jointly optimize bi-directional image transformations combining them with target self-labeling. Moreover we define a new class consistency loss that aligns the generators in the two directions imposing to conserve the class identity of an image passing through both domain mappings. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the reconstructed images confirm the power of our approach. By integrating the two domain specific classifiers obtained with our bi-directional network we exceed previous state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation results on four different benchmark datasets.