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.