Fine-grained facial image-to-image translation with an attention based pipeline generative adversarial framework

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Fine-grained feature detection and recognition is an important but tough work due to the resolution and noisy representation. Synthesize images with a specified tiny feature is even more challenging. Existing image-to-image generation studies usually focus on improving image generation resolution and increasing the representation learning abilities under coarse features. However, generating images with fine-grained attributes under an image-to-image framework is still a tough work. In this paper, we propose an attention based pipeline generative adversarial network (Atten-Pip-GAN) to generate various facial images under multi-label fine-grained attributes with only a neutral facial image. First, we use a pipeline adversarial structure to generate images with multiple features step by step. Second, we use an independent image-to-image framework as a prepossessing method to detection the small fine-grained features and provide an attention map to improve the generation performance of delicate features. Third, we also propose an attention-based location loss to improve the generated performance on small fine-grained features. We apply this method to an open facial image database RaFD and demonstrate the efficiency of Atten-Pip-GAN on generating fine-grained attribute facial images.