Equivariant Adversarial Network for Image-to-image Translation

Image-to-Image translation aims to learn an image from a source domain to a target domain. However, there are three main challenges, such as lack of paired datasets, multimodality, and diversity, that are associated with these problems and need to be dealt with. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), despite of having great performance in many computer vision tasks, they fail to detect the hierarchy of spatial relationships between different parts of an object and thus do not form the ideal representative model we look for. This article presents a new variation of generative models that aims to remedy this problem. We use a trainable transformer, which explicitly allows the spatial manipulation of data within training. This differentiable module can be augmented into the convolutional layers in the generative model, and it allows to freely alter the generated distributions for image-to-image translation. To reap the benefits of proposed module into generative model, our architecture incorporates a new loss function to facilitate an effective end-to-end generative learning for image-to-image translation. The proposed model is evaluated through comprehensive experiments on image synthesizing and image-to-image translation, along with comparisons with several state-of-the-art algorithms.