Masked Style Transfer for Source-Coherent Image-to-Image Translation

The goal of image-to-image translation (I2I) is to translate images from one domain to another while maintaining the content representations. A popular method for I2I translation involves the use of a reference image to guide the transformation process. However, most architectures fail to maintain the input’s main characteristics and produce images that are too similar to the reference during style transfer. In order to avoid this problem, we propose a novel architecture that is able to perform source-coherent translation between multiple domains. Our goal is to preserve the input details during I2I translation by weighting the style code obtained from the reference images before applying it to the source image. Therefore, we choose to mask the reference images in an unsupervised way before extracting the style from them. By doing so, the input characteristics are better maintained while performing the style transfer. As a result, we also increase the diversity in the generated images by extracting the style from the same reference. Additionally, adaptive normalization layers, which are commonly used to inject styles into a model, are substituted with an attention mechanism for the purpose of increasing the quality of the generated images. Several experiments are performed on the CelebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets in order to prove the efficacy of the proposed system. Quantitative results measured using the LPIPS and FID metrics demonstrate the superiority of the proposed architecture compared to the state-of-the-art methods.