Latent Convolutional Models
Authors: ShahRukh Athar, Evgeny Burnaev, Victor Lempitsky
Keywords: latent models, convolutional networks, unsupervised learning, deep learning, modeling natural images, image restoration
TL;DR: We present a new deep latent model of natural images that can be trained from unlabeled datasets and can be utilized to solve various image restoration tasks.
Abstract: We present a new latent model of natural images that can be learned on large-scale datasets. The learning process provides a latent embedding for every image in the training dataset, as well as a deep convolutional network that maps the latent space to the image space. After training, the new model provides a strong and universal image prior for a variety of image restoration tasks such as large-hole inpainting, superresolution, and colorization. To model high-resolution natural images, our approach uses latent spaces of very high dimensionality (one to two orders of magnitude higher than previous latent image models). To tackle this high dimensionality, we use latent spaces with a special manifold structure (convolutional manifolds) parameterized by a ConvNet of a certain architecture. In the experiments, we compare the learned latent models with latent models learned by autoencoders, advanced variants of generative adversarial networks, and a strong baseline system using simpler parameterization of the latent space. Our model outperforms the competing approaches over a range of restoration tasks.