Attribute-controlled face photo synthesis from simple line drawing

Face photo synthesis from simple line drawing is a one-to-many task as simple line drawing merely contains the contour of human face. Previous exemplar-based methods are over-dependent on the datasets and are hard to generalize to complicated natural scenes. Recently, several works utilize deep neural networks to increase the generalization, but they are still limited in the controllability of the users. In this paper, we propose a deep generative model to synthesize face photo from simple line drawing controlled by face attributes such as hair color and complexion. In order to maximize the controllability of face attributes, an attribute-disentangled variational auto-encoder (AD-VAE) is firstly introduced to learn latent representations disentangled with respect to specified attributes. Then we conduct photo synthesis from simple line drawing based on AD-VAE. Experiments show that our model can well disentangle the variations of attributes from other variations of face photos and synthesize detailed photorealistic face images with desired attributes. Regarding background and illumination as the style and human face as the content, we can also synthesize face photos with the target style of a style photo.

1. Introduction

Face sketch-photo synthesis has been well developed in recent years for its widely application on law enforcement. An experienced artist draws a sketch about the suspect according to the description of the witness. Then the sketch is transformed to a photorealistic face image. At last, the synthesized face photo is compared to the images from face datasets to find the suspect.