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.
Stabilization of GANs is another issue that has been researched in depth. @cite_32 demonstrate a technique for the stable training using Wasserstein GANs. It introduces a gradient penalty to enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the discriminator. We use this technique for stable training of our own GAN.
@cite_32
2605135824
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.