EC-GAN: Emotion-Controllable GAN for Face Image Completion

Image completion methods based on deep learning, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have succeeded in producing semantically plausible results. However, existing facial image completion methods can either produce only one result or, although they can provide multiple results, cannot attribute particular emotions to the results. We propose EC-GAN, a novel facial Emotion-Controllable GAN-based image completion model that can infer and customize generative facial emotions. We propose an emotion inference module that infers the emotions of faces based on the unmasked regions of the faces. The emotion inference module is trained in a supervised manner and enforces the encoder to disentangle the emotion semantics from the native latent space. We also developed an emotion control module to modify the latent codes of emotions, moving the latent codes of the initial emotion toward the desired one while maintaining the remaining facial features. Extensive experiments were conducted on two facial datasets, CelebA-HQ and CFEED. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate that EC-GAN produces images with diverse desired expressions even when the main features of the faces are masked. On the other hand, EC-GAN promotes semantic inference capability with irregularly masked holes, resulting in more natural facial expressions.