A3GAN: An Attribute-Aware Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Face Aging

Face aging has received significant research attention in recent years. Although great progress has been achieved with the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in synthesizing realistic images, most existing GAN-based face aging methods have two main problems: 1) unnatural changes of high-level semantic information due to the insufficient consideration of prior knowledge of input faces, and 2) distortions of low-level image content (e.g. modifications in age-irrelevant regions). In this article, we introduce A
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GAN, an Attribute-Aware Attentive face aging model to address the above issues. Facial attribute vectors are regarded as the conditional information and embedded into both the generator and discriminator, encouraging synthesized faces to be faithful to attributes of corresponding inputs. To improve the visual fidelity of generation results, we leverage the attention mechanism to restrict modifications to age-related areas and preserve image details. Unlike previous works with attention modules, we introduce face parsing maps to help the generator distinguish image regions of interest and suppress attention activation elsewhere. Moreover, the wavelet packet transform is employed to capture textural features at multiple scales in the frequency space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in synthesizing photo-realistic aged face images and achieving state-of-the-art performance on popular datasets.