HRInversion: High-Resolution GAN Inversion for Cross-Domain Image Synthesis

Abstract

We investigate GAN inversion problems of using pre-trained GANs to reconstruct real images. Recent methods for such problems typically employ a VGG perceptual loss to measure the difference between images. While the perceptual loss has achieved remarkable success in various computer vision tasks, it may cause unpleasant artifacts and is sensitive to changes in input scale. This paper delivers an important message that algorithm details are crucial for achieving satisfying performance. In particular, we propose two important but undervalued design principles: (i) not down-sampling the input of the perceptual loss to avoid high-frequency artifacts; and (ii) calculating the perceptual loss using convolutional features which are robust to scale. Integrating these designs derives the proposed framework, HRInversion, that achieves superior performance in reconstructing image details. We validate the effectiveness of HRInversion on a cross-domain image synthesis task and propose a post-processing approach named local style optimization (LSO) to synthesize clean and controllable stylized images. For the evaluation of the cross-domain images, we introduce a metric named ID retrieval which captures the similarity of face identities of stylized images to content images. We also test HRInversion on non-square images. Equipped with implicit neural representation, HRInversion applies to ultra-high resolution images with more than 10 million pixels. Furthermore, we show applications of style transfer and 3D-aware GAN inversion, paving the way for extending the application range of HRInversion.