Toward Intelligent Fashion Design: A Texture and Shape Disentangled Generative Adversarial Network

Texture and shape in fashion, constituting essential elements of garments, characterize the body and surface of the fabric and outline the silhouette of clothing, respectively. The selection of texture and shape plays a critical role in the design process, as they largely determine the success of a new design for fashion items. In this research, we propose a texture and shape disentangled generative adversarial network (TSD-GAN) to perform “intelligent” design with the transformation of texture and shape in fashion items. Our TSD-GAN aims to learn how to disentangle the features of texture and shape of different fashion items in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, a fashion attribute encoder is developed to decompose the input fashion items into independent representations of texture and shape. Then, to learn the coarse or fine styles hidden in the features of texture and shape, a texture mapping network and a shape mapping network are proposed to disentangle the features into different hierarchical representations. The different hierarchical representations of texture and shape are then fed into a multi-factor-based generator to generate mixed-style fashion items. In addition, a multi-discriminator framework is developed to distinguish the authenticity and texture similarity between the generated images and the real images. Experimental results on different fashion categories demonstrate that our proposed TSD-GAN may be useful for assisting designers to accomplish the design process by transforming the texture and shape of fashion items.