We describe a novel method of generating high-resolution real-world images of text where the style and textual content of the images are described parametrically. Our method combines text to image retrieval techniques with progressive growing of Generative Adversarial Networks (PGGANs) to achieve conditional generation of photo-realistic images that reflect specific styles, as well as artifacts seen in real-world images. We demonstrate our method in the context of automotive license plates. We assess the impact of varying the number of training images of each style on the fidelity of the generated style, and demonstrate the quality of the generated images using license plate recognition systems.
Several variations of GANs have been designed recently to function in a conditional manner, on an image-to-image basis @cite_10 or on a text-to-image basis @cite_19 . @cite_19 provide a natural language interface to GANs by solving @cite_17 a problem first. The text input is fed into an LSTM-RNN based network to produce an encoding. A similar encoding is then produced for the image through a CNN. These two are then compared based on a symmetric misclassification loss. The correct pairs of text and image encodings thus come closer together in the common embedding space resulting in text based zero-shot image retrieval. @cite_17 use Birds and Flowers datasets and achieves an image retrieval accuracy of around 55-60 A hybrid approach @cite_25 of conditional license plate image synthesis uses rule based image generation along with CycleGAN @cite_10 . The authors produce image templates of the required license plate and then add distortions to them using an image-to-image conversion GAN to generate realistic images.
@cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_25 @cite_17
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have attracted much research attention recently, leading to impressive results for natural image generation. However, to date little success was observed in using GAN generated images for improving classification tasks. Here we attempt to explore, in the context of car license plate recognition, whether it is possible to generate synthetic training data using GAN to improve recognition accuracy. With a carefully-designed pipeline, we show that the answer is affirmative. First, a large-scale image set is generated using the generator of GAN, without manual annotation. Then, these images are fed to a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) followed by a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM), which performs the feature learning and sequence labelling. Finally, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned on real images. Our experimental results on a few data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of using GAN images: an improvement of 7.5 over a strong baseline with moderate-sized real data being available. We show that the proposed framework achieves competitive recognition accuracy on challenging test datasets. We also leverage the depthwise separate convolution to construct a lightweight convolutional RNN, which is about half size and 2x faster on CPU. Combining this framework and the proposed pipeline, we make progress in performing accurate recognition on mobile and embedded devices. Synthesizing high resolution photorealistic images has been a long-standing challenge in machine learning. In this paper we introduce new methods for the improved training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image synthesis. We construct a variant of GANs employing label conditioning that results in 128x128 resolution image samples exhibiting global coherence. We expand on previous work for image quality assessment to provide two new analyses for assessing the discriminability and diversity of samples from class-conditional image synthesis models. These analyses demonstrate that high resolution samples provide class information not present in low resolution samples. Across 1000 ImageNet classes, 128x128 samples are more than twice as discriminable as artificially resized 32x32 samples. In addition, 84.7 of the classes have samples exhibiting diversity comparable to real ImageNet data. Synthesizing high resolution photorealistic images has been a long-standing challenge in machine learning. In this paper we introduce new methods for the improved training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image synthesis. We construct a variant of GANs employing label conditioning that results in 128x128 resolution image samples exhibiting global coherence. We expand on previous work for image quality assessment to provide two new analyses for assessing the discriminability and diversity of samples from class-conditional image synthesis models. These analyses demonstrate that high resolution samples provide class information not present in low resolution samples. Across 1000 ImageNet classes, 128x128 samples are more than twice as discriminable as artificially resized 32x32 samples. In addition, 84.7 of the classes have samples exhibiting diversity comparable to real ImageNet data. 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.