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Title: Harmonic Unpaired Image-to-image Translation

Paper content:
The recent direction of unpaired image-to-image translation is on one hand very exciting as it alleviates the big burden in obtaining label-intensive pixel-to-pixel supervision, but it is on the other hand not fully satisfactory due to the presence of artifacts and degenerated transformations.
In this paper, we take a manifold view of the problem by introducing a smoothness term over the sample graph to attain harmonic functions to enforce consistent mappings during the translation.
We develop HarmonicGAN to learn bi-directional translations between the source and the target domains.
With the help of similarity-consistency, the inherent self-consistency property of samples can be maintained.
Distance metrics defined on two types of features including histogram and CNN are exploited.
Under an identical problem setting as CycleGAN, without additional manual inputs and only at a small training-time cost, HarmonicGAN demonstrates a significant qualitative and quantitative improvement over the state of the art, as well as improved interpretability.
We show experimental results in a number of applications including medical imaging, object transfiguration, and semantic labeling.
We outperform the competing methods in all tasks, and for a medical imaging task in particular our method turns CycleGAN from a failure to a success, halving the mean-squared error, and generating images that radiologists prefer over competing methods in 95% of cases.
Image-to-image translation BID15 aims to learn a mapping from a source domain to a target domain.
As a significant and challenging task in computer vision, image-to-image translation benefits many vision and graphics tasks, such as realistic image synthesis BID15 BID41 , medical image generation BID39 BID9 , and domain adaptation BID13 .
Given a pair of training images with detailed pixel-to-pixel correspondences between the source and the target, image-to-image translation can be cast as a regression problem using e.g. Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) BID23 by minimizing e.g. the per-pixel prediction loss.
Recently, approaches using rich generative models based on Generative Adaptive Networks (GANs) BID11 BID27 BID0 have achieved astonishing success.
The main benefit of introducing GANs BID11 to image-to-image translation BID15 is to attain additional image-level (often through patches) feedback about the overall quality of the translation, and information which is not directly accessible through the per-pixel regression objective.The method by BID15 is able to generate high-quality images, but it requires paired training data which is difficult to collect and often does not exist.
To perform translation without paired data, circularity-based approaches BID41 BID17 BID37 have been proposed to learn translations from a set to another set, using a circularity constraint to establish relationships between the source and target domains and forcing the result generated from a sample in the source domain to map back and generate the original sample.
The original image-to-image translation problem BID15 ) is supervised in pixel-level, whereas the unpaired image-to-image translation task BID41 ) is considered unsupervised, with pixel-level supervision absent but with adversarial supervision at the image-level (in the target domain) present.
By using a cycled regression for the pixel-level prediction (source→target→source) plus a term for the adversarial difference between the transferred images and the target images, CycleGAN is able to successfully, in many cases, train a translation model without paired source→target supervision.
However, lacking a mechanism to enforce regularity in the translation creates problems like in Fig To combat the above issue, in this paper we look at the problem of unpaired image-to-image translation from a manifold learning perspective BID33 BID28 .
Intuitively, the problem can be alleviated by introducing a regularization term in the translation, encouraging similar contents (based on textures or semantics) in the same image to undergo similar translations/transformations.
A common principle in manifold learning is to preserve local distances after the unfolding: forcing neighboring (similar) samples in the original space to be neighbors in the new space.
The same principle has been applied to graph-based semisupervised learning BID44 where harmonic functions with graph Laplacians BID45 BID2 are used to obtain regularized labels of unlabeled data points.During the translation/transformation, some domain-specific attributes are changed, such as the colors, texture, and semantics of certain image regions.
Although there is no supervised information for these changes, certain consistency during the transformation is desirable, meaning that for image contents similar in the source space should also be similar in the target space.
Inspired by graphbased semi-supervised learning BID45 BID44 , we introduce smoothness terms to unpaired image-to-image translation BID41 by providing a stronger regularization for the translation/transformation between the source and target domains, aiming to exploit the "manifold structure" of the source and target domains.
For a pair of similar samples (two different locations in an image; one can think of them as two patches although the receptive fields of CNN are quite large), we add the smoothness term to minimize a weighted distance of the corresponding locations in the target image.
Note that two spatially distant samples might be neighbors in the feature space.
We name our algorithm HarmonicGAN as it behaves harmonically along with the circularity and adversarial constraints to learn a pair of dual translations between the source and target domains, as shown in FIG0 .
Distance metrics defined on two alternative features are adopted: (1) a low-level soft RGB histograms; and (2) CNN (VGG) features with pre-trained semantics.We conduct experiments in a number of applications, showing that in each of them our method outperforms existing methods quantitatively, qualitatively, and with user studies.
For a medical imaging task BID6 that was recently calling attention to a major CycleGAN failure case (learning to accidentally add/remove tumors in an MRI image translation task), our proposed method provides a large improvement over CycleGAN, halving the mean-squared error, and generating images that radiologists prefer over competing methods in 95% of cases.
CONTRIBUTIONS 1.
We introduce smooth regularization over the graph for unpaired image-to-image translation to attain harmonic translations.2.
When building an end-to-end learning pipeline, we adopt two alternative types of feature measures to compute the weight matrix for the graph Laplacian, one based on a soft histogram BID35 and another based on semantic CNN (VGG) features BID31 .3.
We show that this method results in significantly improved consistency for transformations.
With experiments on multiple translation tasks, we demonstrate that HarmonicGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art.
We introduce a smoothness term over the sample graph to enforce smoothness-consistency between the source and target domains.
We have shown that by introducing additional regularization to enforce consistent mappings during the image-to-image translation, the inherent self-consistency property of samples can be maintained.
Through a set of quantitative, qualitative and user studies, we have demonstrated that this results in a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art methods in a number of applications including medical imaging, object transfiguration, and semantic labeling.
In a medical imaging task in particular our method provides a very significant improvement over CycleGAN.
(1) They show different motivations and formulations.
The distance constraint aims to preserve the distance between samples in the mapping in a direct way, so it minimizes the expectation of differences between distances in two domains.
The distance constraint in DistanceGAN is not doing a graph-based Laplacian to explicitly enforce smoothness.
In contrast, the smoothness constraint is designed from a graph Laplacian to build the similarity-consistency between image patches.
Thus, the smoothness constraint uses the affinity between two patches as weight to measure the similarityconsistency between two domains.
The whole idea is based on manifold learning.
The smoothness term defines a Laplacian ∆ = D − W , where W is our weight matrix and D is a diagonal matrix with D i = j w ij , thus, the smoothness term defines a graph Laplacian with the minimal value achieved as a harmonic function.(2
) They are different in implementation. The
smoothness constraint in HarmonicGAN is computed on image patches while the distance constraint in DistanceGAN is computed on whole image samples. Therefore
, the smoothness constraint is fine-grained compared to the distance constraint. Moreover
, the distances in DistanceGAN is directly computed from the samples in each domain. They scale
the distances with the precomputed means and stds of two domains to reduce the effect of the gap between two domains. Differently
, the smoothness constraint in HarmonicGAN is measured on the features (Histogram or CNN features) of each patch, which maps samples in two domains into the same feature space and removes the gap between two domains.(3) They show
different results. FIG5 shows the
qualitative results of CycleGAN, DistanceGAN and the proposed HarmonicGAN on the BRATS dataset. As shown in FIG5
, the problem of randomly adding/removing tumors in the translation of CycleGAN is still present in the results of Distance-GAN, while HarmonicGAN can correct the location of tumors. Table 1 shows the
quantitative results on the whole test set, which also yields the same conclusion. The results of DistanceGAN
on four metrics are even worse than CycleGAN, while HarmonicGAN yields a large improvement over CycleGAN.

assistant: text: Smooth regularization over sample graph for unpaired image-to-image translation results in significantly improved consistency