Face Synthesis with Landmark Points from Generative Adversarial Networks and Inverse Latent Space Mapping

Abstract

Facial landmarks refer to the localization of fundamental facial points on face images. There have been a tremendous amount of attempts to detect these points from facial images however, there has never been an attempt to synthesize a random face and generate its corresponding facial landmarks. This paper presents a framework for augmenting a dataset in a latent Z-space and applied to the regression problem of generating a corresponding set of landmarks from a 2D facial dataset. The BEGAN framework has been used to train a face generator from CelebA database. The inverse of the generator is implemented using an Adam optimizer to generate the latent vector corresponding to each facial image, and a lightweight deep neural network is trained to map latent Z-space vectors to the landmark space. Initial results are promising and provide a generic methodology to augment annotated image datasets with additional intermediate samples.