GAN-Based Face Attribute Editing

Recently, a variety of methods using the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for face editing have been proposed. However, the existing methods cannot control the editing content of the face elements according to the user-specified attributes or need to train a conditional GAN for editing tasks, which means it is difficult to add new attributes in the future. In this paper, a method to edit face attributes by editing the latent variable with the help of a pre-trained unconditional GAN and a linear classification model is proposed. In particular, face attribute editing is divided into two separate stages: Firstly, based on the optimization function, the generative model does a latent variable search to generate a high-quality face image that is similar to the input image. Secondly, by editing the latent variable of the GAN, the attribute of the generated face image can be modified indirectly, so it is almost unaffected by the training process and network structure of GAN, which means it is a flexible method for nearly all GAN network. Images of the FFHQ dataset are edited by attribute labels defined in Celeba dataset for experiments. These experiments prove that our method can edit a variety of face images that vary with race, gender, age, and camera shooting angle. The overall quality of the edited image is not inferior to the other face attribute editing method, and attribute classification for edited image shows a 92.6% attribute editing success rate of the proposed method.