3D Aided Duet GANs for Multi-View Face Image Synthesis

Multi-view face synthesis from a single image is an ill-posed computer vision problem. It often suffers from appearance distortions if it is not well-defined. Producing photo-realistic and identity preserving multi-view results is still a not well-defined synthesis problem. This paper proposes 3D aided duet generative adversarial networks (AD-GAN) to precisely rotate the yaw angle of an input face image to any specified angle. AD-GAN decomposes the challenging synthesis problem into two well-constrained subtasks that correspond to a face normalizer and a face editor. The normalizer first frontalizes an input image, and then the editor rotates the frontalized image to a desired pose guided by a remote code. In the meantime, the face normalizer is designed to estimate a novel dense UV correspondence field, making our model aware of 3D face geometry information. In order to generate photo-realistic local details and accelerate convergence process, the normalizer and the editor are trained in a two-stage manner and regulated by a conditional self-cycle loss and a perceptual loss. Exhaustive experiments on both controlled and uncontrolled environments demonstrate that the proposed method not only improves the visual realism of multi-view synthetic images but also preserves identity information well.