CoGAN: Cooperatively trained conditional and unconditional GAN for person image generation

Person image generation aims to synthesize realistic person images that follow the same distribution as the given dataset. Previous attempts can be generally categorized into two classes: conditional GAN and unconditional GAN. The former usually uses pose information as condition to make pose transfer using GAN. The generated person have the same identity as the source person. The latter generates person images from scratch, and the real person images are only used as references for the discriminator. While conditional GAN is widely studied, unconditional GAN is also worth exploring because it can synthesize person image with new identity, which is a useful manner of data augmentation. These two types of generating methods have their different advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes they are complementary. This paper proposes a CoGAN to cooperatively train two types of GANs in an end-to-end framework. The two GANs serve different purposes, and can learn from each other during the cooperative learning procedure. The experimental results on public datasets show that the proposed CoGAN improves the performance of both baseline methods, and achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods.