Mask guided diverse face image synthesis

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in face image generation task. However, existing approaches have limited diversity, quality and controllability in generating results. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end learning framework to generate diverse, realistic and controllable face images guided by face masks. The face mask provides a good geometric constraint for a face by specifying the size and location of different components of the face, such as eyes, nose and mouse. The framework consists of four components: style encoder, style decoder, generator and discriminator. The style encoder generates a style code which represents the style of the result face; the generator translate the input face mask into a real face based on the style code; the style decoder learns to reconstruct the style code from the generated face image; and the discriminator classifies an input face image as real or fake. With the style code, the proposed model can generate different face images matching the input face mask, and by manipulating the face mask, we can finely control the generated face image. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on mask guided face image synthesis task.