Image Translation by Domain-Adversarial Training

Image translation, where the input image is mapped to its synthetic counterpart, is attractive in terms of wide applications in fields of computer graphics and computer vision. Despite significant progress on this problem, largely due to a surge of interest in conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs), most of the cGAN-based approaches require supervised data, which are rarely available and expensive to provide. Instead we elaborate a common framework that is also applicable to the unsupervised cases, learning the image prior by conditioning the discriminator on unaligned targets to reduce the mapping space and improve the generation quality. Besides, domain-adversarial training inspired by domain adaptation is proposed to capture discriminative and expressive features, for the purpose of improving fidelity. Effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by compelling experimental results of our method and comparisons with several baselines. As for the generality, it could be analyzed from two perspectives: adaptation to both supervised and unsupervised setting and the diversity of tasks.