Generative Adversarial Networks: A Survey and Taxonomy

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably the revolutionary techniques are in the area of computer vision such as plausible image generation, image to image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant success achieved in computer vision field, applying GANs over real-world problems still have three main challenges: (1) High quality image generation; (2) Diverse image generation; and (3) Stable training. Considering numerous GAN-related research in the literature, we provide a study on the architecture-variants and loss-variants, which are proposed to handle these three challenges from two perspectives. We propose loss and architecture-variants for classifying most popular GANs, and discuss the potential improvements with focusing on these two aspects. While several reviews for GANs have been presented, there is no work focusing on the review of GAN-variants based on handling challenges mentioned above. In this paper, we review and critically discuss 7 architecture-variant GANs and 9 loss-variant GANs for remedying those three challenges. The objective of this review is to provide an insight on the footprint that current GANs research focuses on the performance improvement. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on https://github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.

Neuroscore: A Brain-inspired Evaluation Metric for Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are increasingly attracting attention in the computer vision, natural language processing, speech synthesis and similar domains. Arguably the most striking results have been in the area of image synthesis. However, evaluating the performance of GANs is still an open and challenging problem. Existing evaluation metrics primarily measure the dissimilarity between real and generated images using automated statistical methods. They often require large sample sizes for evaluation and do not directly reflect the human perception of the image quality. In this work, we introduce an evaluation metric we call Neuroscore, for evaluating the performance of GANs, that more directly reflects psychoperceptual image quality through the utilization of brain signals. Our results show that Neuroscore has superior performances to the current evaluation metrics in that: (1) It is more consistent with human judgment; (2) The evaluation process needs much smaller numbers of samples; and (3) It is able to rank the quality of images on a per GAN basis. A convolutional neural network based brain-inspired framework is also proposed to predict Neuroscore from GAN-generated images. Importantly, we show that including neural responses during the training phase of the network can significantly improve the prediction capability of the proposed model.

Quick and Easy Time Series Generation with Established Image-based GANs

In the recent years Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated significant progress in generating authentic looking data. In this work we introduce our simple method to exploit the advancements in well established image-based GANs to synthesise single channel time series data. We implement Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) with gradient penalty due to their stability in training to synthesise three different types of data; sinusoidal data, photoplethysmograph (PPG) data and electrocardiograph (ECG) data. The length of the returned time series data is limited only by the image resolution, we use an image size of 64x64 pixels which yields 4096 data points. We present both visual and quantitative evidence that our novel method can successfully generate time series data using image-based GANs.

Spatial Filtering Pipeline Evaluation of Cortically Coupled Computer Vision System for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a paradigm that supports the application of cortically coupled computer vision to rapid image search. In RSVP, images are presented to participants in a rapid serial sequence which can evoke Event-related Potentials (ERPs) detectable in their Electroencephalogram (EEG). The contemporary approach to this problem involves supervised spatial filtering techniques which are applied for the purposes of enhancing the discriminative information in the EEG data. In this paper we make two primary contributions to that field: 1) We propose a novel spatial filtering method which we call the Multiple Time Window LDA Beamformer (MTWLB) method; 2) we provide a comprehensive comparison of nine spatial filtering pipelines using three spatial filtering schemes namely, MTWLB, xDAWN, Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) and three linear classification methods Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Bayesian Linear Regression (BLR) and Logistic Regression (LR). Three pipelines without spatial filtering are used as baseline comparison. The Area Under Curve (AUC) is used as an evaluation metric in this paper. The results reveal that MTWLB and xDAWN spatial filtering techniques enhance the classification performance of the pipeline but CSP does not. The results also support the conclusion that LR can be effective for RSVP based BCI if discriminative features are available.

An Interpretable Machine Vision Approach to Human Activity Recognition using Photoplethysmograph Sensor Data

The current gold standard for human activity recognition (HAR) is based on the use of cameras. However, the poor scalability of camera systems renders them impractical in pursuit of the goal of wider adoption of HAR in mobile computing contexts. Consequently, researchers instead rely on wearable sensors and in particular inertial sensors. A particularly prevalent wearable is the smart watch which due to its integrated inertial and optical sensing capabilities holds great potential for realising better HAR in a non-obtrusive way. This paper seeks to simplify the wearable approach to HAR through determining if the wrist-mounted optical sensor alone typically found in a smartwatch or similar device can be used as a useful source of data for activity recognition. The approach has the potential to eliminate the need for the inertial sensing element which would in turn reduce the cost of and complexity of smartwatches and fitness trackers. This could potentially commoditise the hardware requirements for HAR while retaining the functionality of both heart rate monitoring and activity capture all from a single optical sensor. Our approach relies on the adoption of machine vision for activity recognition based on suitably scaled plots of the optical signals. We take this approach so as to produce classifications that are easily explainable and interpretable by non-technical users. More specifically, images of photoplethysmography signal time series are used to retrain the penultimate layer of a convolutional neural network which has initially been trained on the ImageNet database. We then use the 2048 dimensional features from the penultimate layer as input to a support vector machine. Results from the experiment yielded an average classification accuracy of 92.3%. This result outperforms that of an optical and inertial sensor combined (78%) and illustrates the capability of HAR systems using...

Use of Neural Signals to Evaluate the Quality of Generative Adversarial Network Performance in Facial Image Generation

There is a growing interest in using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to produce image content that is indistinguishable from a real image as judged by a typical person. A number of GAN variants for this purpose have been proposed, however, evaluating GANs is inherently difficult because current methods of measuring the quality of the output do not always mirror what is actually perceived by a human. We propose a novel approach that deploys a brain-computer interface to generate a neural score that closely mirrors the behavioral ground truth measured from participants discerning real from synthetic images. In this paper, we first compare the three most widely used metrics in the literature for evaluating GANs in terms of visual quality compared to human judgments. Second, we propose and demonstrate a novel approach using neural signals and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) that directly measures a human perceptual response to facial production quality independent of a behavioral response measurement. Finally we show that our neural score is more consistent with human judgment compared to the conventional metrics we evaluated. We conclude that neural signals have potential application for high quality, rapid evaluation of GANs in the context of visual image synthesis.