Deep Photo Enhancer: Unpaired Learning for Image Enhancement from Photographs with GANs

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.