The Pix2pix and CycleGAN losses have vastly improved the qualitative and quantitative visual quality of results in image-to-image translation tasks. We extend this framework by exploring approximately invertible architectures which are well suited to these losses. These architectures are approximately invertible by design and thus partially satisfy cycle-consistency before training even begins. Furthermore, since invertible architectures have constant memory complexity in depth, these models can be built arbitrarily deep. We are able to demonstrate superior quantitative output on the Cityscapes and Maps datasets at near constant memory budget.
Synthetic image translation has significant potentials in autonomous transportation systems. That is due to the expense of data collection and annotation as well as the unmanageable diversity of real-words situations. The main issue with unpaired image-to-image translation is the ill-posed nature of the problem. In this work, we propose a novel method for constraining the output space of unpaired image-to-image translation. We make the assumption that the environment of the source domain is known (e.g. synthetically generated), and we propose to explicitly enforce preservation of the ground-truth labels on the translated images. We experiment on preserving ground-truth information such as semantic segmentation, disparity, and instance segmentation. We show significant evidence that our method achieves improved performance over the state-of-the-art model of UNIT for translating images from SYNTHIA to Cityscapes. The generated images are perceived as more realistic in human surveys and outperforms UNIT when used in a domain adaptation scenario for semantic segmentation.
Image-to-image (I2I) translation methods based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) typically suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. In this work, we propose a data augmentation method (ReMix) to tackle this issue. We interpolate training samples at the feature level and propose a novel content loss based on the perceptual relations among samples. The generator learns to translate the in-between samples rather than memorizing the training set, and thereby forces the discriminator to generalize. The proposed approach effectively reduces the ambiguity of generation and renders content-preserving results. The ReMix method can be easily incorporated into existing GAN models with minor modifications. Experimental results on numerous tasks demonstrate that GAN models equipped with the ReMix method achieve significant improvements.
For unpaired image-to-image translation tasks, GAN-based approaches are susceptible to semantic flipping, i.e., contents are not preserved consistently. We argue that this is due to (1) the difference in semantic statistics between source and target domains and (2) the learned generators being non-robust. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach, Lipschitz regularized CycleGAN, for improving semantic robustness and thus alleviating the semantic flipping issue. During training, we add a gradient penalty loss to the generators, which encourages semantically consistent transformations. We evaluate our approach on multiple common datasets and compare with several existing GAN-based methods. Both quantitative and visual results suggest the effectiveness and advantage of our approach in producing robust transformations with fewer semantic flipping.
Detection of visual anomalies refers to the problem of finding patterns in different imaging data that do not conform to the expected visual appearance and is a widely studied problem in different domains. Due to the nature of anomaly occurrences and underlying generating processes, it is hard to characterize them and obtain labeled data. Obtaining labeled data is especially difficult in biomedical applications, where only trained domain experts can provide labels, which often come in large diversity and complexity. Recently presented approaches for unsupervised detection of visual anomalies approaches omit the need for labeled data and demonstrate promising results in domains, where anomalous samples significantly deviate from the normal appearance. Despite promising results, the performance of such approaches still lags behind supervised approaches and does not provide a one-fits-all solution. In this work, we present an image-to-image translation-based framework that significantly surpasses the performance of existing unsupervised methods and approaches the performance of supervised methods in a challenging domain of cancerous region detection in histology imagery.
In many cases, especially with medical images, it is prohibitively challenging to produce a sufficiently large training sample of pixel-level annotations to train deep neural networks for semantic image segmentation. On the other hand, some information is often known about the contents of images. We leverage information on whether an image presents the segmentation target or whether it is absent from the image to improve segmentation performance by augmenting the amount of data usable for model training. Specifically, we propose a semi-supervised framework that employs image-to-image translation between weak labels (e.g., presence vs. absence of cancer), in addition to fully supervised segmentation on some examples. We conjecture that this translation objective is well aligned with the segmentation objective as both require the same disentangling of image variations. Building on prior image-to-image translation work, we re-use the encoder and decoders for translating in either direction between two domains, employing a strategy of selectively decoding domain-specific variations. For presence vs. absence domains, the encoder produces variations that are common to both and those unique to the presence domain. Furthermore, we successfully re-use one of the decoders used in translation for segmentation. We validate the proposed method on synthetic tasks of varying difficulty as well as on the real task of brain tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance images, where we show significant improvements over standard semi-supervised training with autoencoding.
It is well known that humans can learn and recognize objects effectively from several limited image samples. However, learning from just a few images is still a tremendous challenge for existing main-stream deep neural networks. Inspired by analogical reasoning in the human mind, a feasible strategy is to translate the abundant images of a rich source domain to enrich the relevant yet different target domain with insufficient image data. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel, effective multi-adversarial framework (MA) based on part-global learning, which accomplishes one-shot cross-domain image-to-image translation. In specific, we first devise a part-global adversarial training scheme to provide an efficient way for feature extraction and prevent discriminators being over-fitted. Then, a multi-adversarial mechanism is employed to enhance the image-to-image translation ability to unearth the high-level semantic representation. Moreover, a balanced adversarial loss function is presented, which aims to balance the training data and stabilize the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can obtain impressive results on various datasets between two extremely imbalanced image domains and outperform state-of-the-art methods on one-shot image-to-image translation.
We introduce Delta Denoising Score (DDS), a novel scoring function for text-based image editing that guides minimal modifications of an input image towards the content described in a target prompt. DDS leverages the rich generative prior of text-to-image diffusion models and can be used as a loss term in an optimization problem to steer an image towards a desired direction dictated by a text. DDS utilizes the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) mechanism for the purpose of image editing. We show that using only SDS often produces non-detailed and blurry outputs due to noisy gradients. To address this issue, DDS uses a prompt that matches the input image to identify and remove undesired erroneous directions of SDS. Our key premise is that SDS should be zero when calculated on pairs of matched prompts and images, meaning that if the score is non-zero, its gradients can be attributed to the erroneous component of SDS. Our analysis demonstrates the competence of DDS for text based image-to-image translation. We further show that DDS can be used to train an effective zero-shot image translation model. Experimental results indicate that DDS outperforms existing methods in terms of stability and quality, highlighting its potential for real-world applications in text-based image editing.
Behavior of neural networks is irremediably determined by the specific loss and data used during training. However it is often desirable to tune the model at inference time based on external factors such as preferences of the user or dynamic characteristics of the data. This is especially important to balance the perception-distortion trade-off of ill-posed image-to-image translation tasks. In this work, we propose to optimize a parametric tunable convolutional layer, which includes a number of different kernels, using a parametric multi-loss, which includes an equal number of objectives. Our key insight is to use a shared set of parameters to dynamically interpolate both the objectives and the kernels. During training, these parameters are sampled at random to explicitly optimize all possible combinations of objectives and consequently disentangle their effect into the corresponding kernels. During inference, these parameters become interactive inputs of the model hence enabling reliable and consistent control over the model behavior. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our tunable convolutions effectively work as a drop-in replacement for traditional convolutions in existing neural networks at virtually no extra computational cost, outperforming state-of-the-art control strategies in a wide range of applications; including image denoising, deblurring, super-resolution, and style transfer.
The CycleGAN framework allows for unsupervised image-to-image translation of unpaired data. In a scenario of surgical training on a physical surgical simulator, this method can be used to transform endoscopic images of phantoms into images which more closely resemble the intra-operative appearance of the same surgical target structure. This can be viewed as a novel augmented reality approach, which we coined Hyperrealism in previous work. In this use case, it is of paramount importance to display objects like needles, sutures or instruments consistent in both domains while altering the style to a more tissue-like appearance. Segmentation of these objects would allow for a direct transfer, however, contouring of these, partly tiny and thin foreground objects is cumbersome and perhaps inaccurate. Instead, we propose to use landmark detection on the points when sutures pass into the tissue. This objective is directly incorporated into a CycleGAN framework by treating the performance of pre-trained detector models as an additional optimization goal. We show that a task defined on these sparse landmark labels improves consistency of synthesis by the generator network in both domains. Comparing a baseline CycleGAN architecture to our proposed extension (DetCycleGAN), mean precision (PPV) improved by +61.32, mean sensitivity (TPR) by +37.91, and mean F1 score by +0.4743. Furthermore, it could be shown that by dataset fusion, generated intra-operative images can be leveraged as additional training data for the detection network itself. The data is released within the scope of the AdaptOR MICCAI Challenge 2021 at https://adaptor2021.github.io/, and code at https://github.com/Cardio-AI/detcyclegan_pytorch.