Image-to-Image Transfer Makes Chaos to Order

GAN-based image-to-image transfer tools have achieved remarkable results in image generation. However, most of the research efforts focus on changing the style features, e.g., color and texture. The spatial features, e.g., the locations of objects in input and output images, always keep consistent. If the above tools are employed to translate locations, such as organizing objects from a chaotic scene to an orderly scene in images (i.e., chaos to order), can these tools work well? Therefore, we investigate the issue of image-to-image location transfer and receive a preliminary conclusion that it is hard to manipulate spatial features of objects in raw images automatically. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called LT-GAN to address the above issue. Specifically, a multi-stage generation structure is designed, where the location translation is performed based on semantic labels as a bridge to enhance the effect of automatically manipulate the spatial features of raw images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-stage generation strategy. Meanwhile, a Color Histogram Loss is explored to evaluate the similarity of color distribution between a chaotic scene image and the corresponding orderly scene image. The quality of orderly scene images generated by the final stage is improved significantly in LT-GAN by using the combination of feature extraction and the Color Histogram Loss. Moreover, to break through the limitation of public datasets in image-to-image transfer tasks, a new dataset named M2C is constructed for this new application scenario of location transfer, including more than 15,000 paired images and the corresponding semantic labels in total. The dataset is available at \urlhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1amr9ga9wvhnIzeZ48OHbLapHGqOb4-Up