FastFaceCLIP: A lightweight text-driven high-quality face image manipulation

Abstract

Although many new methods have emerged in text-driven images, the large computational power required for model training causes these methods to have a slow training process. Additionally, these methods consume a considerable amount of video random access memory (VRAM) resources during training. When generating high-resolution images, the VRAM resources are often insufficient, which results in the inability to generate high-resolution images. Nevertheless, recent Vision Transformers (ViTs) advancements have demonstrated their image classification and recognition capabilities. Unlike the traditional Convolutional Neural Networks based methods, ViTs have a Transformer-based architecture, leverage attention mechanisms to capture comprehensive global information, moreover enabling enhanced global understanding of images through inherent long-range dependencies, thus extracting more robust features and achieving comparable results with reduced computational load. The adaptability of ViTs to text-driven image manipulation was investigated. Specifically, existing image generation methods were refined and the FastFaceCLIP method was proposed by combining the image-text semantic alignment function of the pre-trained CLIP model with the high-resolution image generation function of the proposed FastFace. Additionally, the Multi-Axis Nested Transformer module was incorporated for advanced feature extraction from the latent space, generating higher-resolution images that are further enhanced using the Real-ESRGAN algorithm. Eventually, extensive face manipulation-related tests on the CelebA-HQ dataset challenge the proposed method and other related schemes, demonstrating that FastFaceCLIP effectively generates semantically accurate, visually realistic, and clear images using fewer parameters and less time.