Content-Style Decoupling for Unsupervised Makeup Transfer without Generating Pseudo Ground Truth
Authors: Zhaoyang Sun, Shengwu Xiong, Yaxiong Chen, Yi Rong

The absence of real targets to guide the model training is one of the main problems with the makeup transfer task. Most existing methods tackle this problem by synthesizing pseudo ground truths (PGTs). However the generated PGTs are often sub-optimal and their imprecision will eventually lead to performance degradation. To alleviate this issue in this paper we propose a novel Content-Style Decoupled Makeup Transfer (CSD-MT) method which works in a purely unsupervised manner and thus eliminates the negative effects of generating PGTs. Specifically based on the frequency characteristics analysis we assume that the low-frequency (LF) component of a face image is more associated with its makeup style information while the high-frequency (HF) component is more related to its content details. This assumption allows CSD-MT to decouple the content and makeup style information in each face image through the frequency decomposition. After that CSD-MT realizes makeup transfer by maximizing the consistency of these two types of information between the transferred result and input images respectively. Two newly designed loss functions are also introduced to further improve the transfer performance. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses show the effectiveness of our CSD-MT method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Snowfallingplum/CSD-MT.