Identity-preserving editing of multiple facial attributes by learning global edit directions and local adjustments

Abstract

Semantic facial attribute editing using pre-trained Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has attracted a great deal of attention and effort from researchers in recent years. Due to the high quality of face images generated by StyleGANs, much work has focused on the StyleGANs’ latent space and the proposed methods for facial image editing. Although these methods have achieved satisfying results for manipulating user-intended attributes, they have not fulfilled the goal of preserving the identity, which is an important challenge. We present ID-Style, a new architecture capable of addressing the problem of identity loss during attribute manipulation. The key components of ID-Style include a Learnable Global Direction (LGD) module, which finds a shared and semi-sparse direction for each attribute, and an Instance-Aware Intensity Predictor (IAIP) network, which finetunes the global direction according to the input instance. Furthermore, we introduce two losses during training to enforce the LGD and IAIP to find semi-sparse semantic directions that preserve the identity of the input instance. Despite reducing the size of the network by roughly 95% as compared to similar state-of-the-art works, ID-Style outperforms baselines by 10% and 7% in identity preserving metric (FRS) and average accuracy of manipulation (mACC), respectively.