Perceptual pyramid adversarial networks for text-to-image synthesis

Abstract

Generating photo-realistic images conditioned on semantic text descriptions is a challenging task in computer vision field. Due to the nature of hierarchical representations learned in CNN, it is intuitive to utilize richer convolutional features to improve text-to-image synthesis. In this paper, we propose Perceptual Pyramid Adversarial Network (PPAN) to directly synthesize multi-scale images conditioned on texts in an adversarial way. Specifically, we design one pyramid generator and three independent discriminators to synthesize and regularize multi-scale photo-realistic images in one feed-forward process. At each pyramid level, our method takes coarse-resolution features as input, synthesizes high-resolution images, and uses convolutions for up-sampling to finer level. Furthermore, the generator adopts the perceptual loss to enforce semantic similarity between the synthesized image and the ground truth, while a multi-purpose discriminator encourages semantic consistency, image fidelity and class invariance. Experimental results show that our PPAN sets new records for text-to-image synthesis on two benchmark datasets: CUB (i.e., 4.38 Inception Score and.290 Visual-semantic Similarity) and Oxford-102 (i.e., 3.52 Inception Score and.297 Visual-semantic Similarity).