Unsupervised Eyeglasses Removal in the Wild

Eyeglasses removal is challenging in removing different kinds of eyeglasses, e.g., rimless glasses, full-rim glasses, and sunglasses, and recovering appropriate eyes. Due to the significant visual variants, the conventional methods lack scalability. Most existing works focus on the frontal face images in the controlled environment, such as the laboratory, and need to design specific systems for different eyeglass types. To address the limitation, we propose a unified eyeglass removal model called the eyeglasses removal generative adversarial network (ERGAN), which could handle different types of glasses in the wild. The proposed method does not depend on the dense annotation of eyeglasses location but benefits from the large-scale face images with weak annotations. Specifically, we study the two relevant tasks simultaneously, that is, removing eyeglasses and wearing eyeglasses. Given two face images with and without eyeglasses, the proposed model learns to swap the eye area in two faces. The generation mechanism focuses on the eye area and invades the difficulty of generating a new face. In the experiment, we show the proposed method achieves a competitive removal quality in terms of realism and diversity. Furthermore, we evaluate ERGAN on several subsequent tasks, such as face verification and facial expression recognition. The experiment shows that our method could serve as a preprocessing method for these tasks.