Semi-Supervised Spatial Attention Method for Facial Attribute Editing

In recent years, facial attribute editing has been successfully used to effectively change face images of various attributes based on generative adversarial networks and encoder-decoder models. However, existing models have a limitation in that they may change an unintended part in the process of changing an attribute or may generate an unnatural result. In this paper, we propose a model that improves the learning of the attention mask by adding a spatial attention mechanism based on the unified selective transfer network (referred to as STGAN) using semi-supervised learning. The proposed model can edit multiple attributes while preserving details independent of the attributes being edited. This study makes two main contributions to the literature. First, we propose an encoder-decoder model structure that learns and edits multiple facial attributes and suppresses distortion using an attention mask. Second, we define guide masks and propose a method and an objective function that use the guide masks for multiple facial attribute editing through semi-supervised learning. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the experimental results, the proposed method was proven to yield improved results that preserve the image details by suppressing unintended changes than existing methods. Keywords: Facial attribute editing, spatial attention mechanism, semi-supervised learning, generative adversarial network, STGAN.