Multi-Level Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks with Attention Mechanism for Face Sketch-Photo Synthesis

The synthesis between face sketches and face photos has important application values in law enforcement and digital entertainment. In cases of a lack of paired sketch-photo data, this paper proposes an unsupervised model to solve the problems of missing key facial details and a lack of realism in the synthesized images of existing methods. The model is built on the CycleGAN architecture. To retain more semantic information in the target domain, a multi-scale feature extraction module is inserted before the generator. In addition, the convolutional block attention module is introduced into the generator to enhance the ability of the model to extract important feature information. Via CBAM, the model improves the quality of the converted image and reduces the artifacts caused by image background interference. Next, in order to preserve more identity information in the generated photo, this paper constructs the multi-level cycle consistency loss function. Qualitative experiments on CUFS and CUFSF public datasets show that the facial details and edge structures synthesized by our model are clearer and more realistic. Meanwhile the performance indexes of structural similarity and peak signal-to-noise ratio in quantitative experiments are also significantly improved compared with other methods.