Unsupervised Facial Geometry Learning for Sketch to Photo Synthesis

Face sketch-photo synthesis is a critical application in law enforcement and digital entertainment industry where the goal is to learn the mapping between a face sketch image and its corresponding photo-realistic image. However, the limited number of paired sketch-photo training data usually prevents the current frameworks to learn a robust mapping between the geometry of sketches and their matching photo-realistic images. Consequently, in this work, we present an approach for learning to synthesize a photo-realistic image from a face sketch in an unsupervised fashion. In contrast to current unsupervised image-to-image translation techniques, our framework leverages a novel perceptual discriminator to learn the geometry of human face. Learning facial prior information empowers the network to remove the geometrical artifacts in the face sketch. We demonstrate that a simultaneous optimization of the face photo generator network, employing the proposed perceptual discriminator in combination with a texture-wise discriminator, results in a significant improvement in quality and recognition rate of the synthesized photos. We evaluate the proposed network by conducting extensive experiments on multiple baseline sketch-photo datasets.