Fine-Detailed Facial Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis with Detail-Enhanced Codebook Priors

Generating high-quality facial photos from fine-detailed sketches is a long-standing research topic that remains unsolved. The scarcity of large-scale paired data due to the cost of acquiring hand-drawn sketches poses a major challenge. Existing methods either lose identity information with oversimplified representations, or rely on costly inversion and strict alignment when using StyleGAN-based priors, limiting their practical applicability. Our primary finding in this work is that the discrete codebook and decoder trained through self-reconstruction in the photo domain can learn rich priors, helping to reduce ambiguity in cross-domain mapping even with current small-scale paired datasets. Based on this, a cross-domain mapping network can be directly constructed. However, empirical findings indicate that using the discrete codebook for cross-domain mapping often results in unrealistic textures and distorted spatial layouts. Therefore, we propose a Hierarchical Adaptive Texture-Spatial Correction (HATSC) module to correct the flaws in texture and spatial layouts. Besides, we introduce a Saliency-based Key Details Enhancement (SKDE) module to further enhance the synthesis quality. Overall, we present a “reconstruct-cross-enhance” pipeline for synthesizing facial photos from fine-detailed sketches. Experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-quality facial photos and significantly outperforms previous approaches across a wide range of challenging benchmarks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Gardenia-chen/DECP.