Face Image Retrieval with Attribute Manipulation

Current face image retrieval solutions are limited, since they treat different facial attributes the same and cannot incorporate user’s preference for a subset of attributes in their search criteria. This paper introduces a new face image retrieval framework, where the input face query is augmented by both an adjustment vector that specifies the desired modifications to the facial attributes, and a preference vector that assigns different levels of importance to different attributes. For example, a user can ask for retrieving images similar to a query image, but with a different hair color, and no preference for absence/presence of eyeglasses in the results. To achieve this, we propose to disentangle the semantics, corresponding to various attributes, by learning a set of sparse and orthogonal basis vectors in the latent space of StyleGAN. Such basis vectors are then employed to decompose the dissimilarity between face images in terms of dissimilarity between their attributes, assign preference to the attributes, and adjust the attributes in the query. Enforcing sparsity on the basis vectors helps us to disentangle the latent space and adjust each attribute independently from other attributes, while enforcing orthogonality facilitates preference assignment and the dissimilarity decomposition. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated by achieving state-of-the-art results for the face image retrieval task.