Conditional GANs For Painting Generation

Abstract

We examined the use of modern Generative Adversarial Nets to generate novel images of oil paintings using the Painter By Numbers dataset. We implemented Spectral Normalization GAN (SN-GAN) and Spectral Normalization GAN with Gradient Penalty, and compared their outputs to a Deep Convolutional GAN. Visually, and quantitatively according to the Sliced Wasserstein Distance metric, we determined that the SN-GAN produced paintings that were most comparable to our training dataset. We then performed a series of experiments to add supervised conditioning to SN-GAN, the culmination of which is what we believe to be a novel architecture that can generate face paintings with user-specified characteristics.