Heredity-aware Child Face Image Generation with Latent Space Disentanglement

Generative adversarial networks have been widely used in image synthesis in recent years and the quality of the generated image has been greatly improved. However, the flexibility to control and decouple facial attributes (e.g., eyes, nose, mouth) is still limited. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called ChildGAN, to generate a child’s image according to the images of parents with heredity prior. The main idea is to disentangle the latent space of a pre-trained generation model and precisely control the face attributes of child images with clear semantics. We use distances between face landmarks as pseudo labels to figure out the most influential semantic vectors of the corresponding face attributes by calculating the gradient of latent vectors to pseudo labels. Furthermore, we disentangle the semantic vectors by weighting irrelevant features and orthogonalizing them with Schmidt Orthogonalization. Finally, we fuse the latent vector of the parents by leveraging the disentangled semantic vectors under the guidance of biological genetic laws. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing methods with encouraging results.