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AEP-GAN: Aesthetic Enhanced Perception Generative Adversarial Network for Asian facial beauty synthesis

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Abstract

In this paper, we address the task of facial aesthetics enhancement (FAE). Existing methods have made great progress, however, beautified images generated by existing methods are extremely prone to over-beautification, which limits the application of existing aesthetic enhancement methods in real scenes. To solve this problem, we propose a new method called aesthetic enhanced perception generative adversarial network (AEP-GAN). We builds three blocks to complete facial beautification guided by facial aesthetic landmarks: an aesthetic deformation perception block (ADP), an aesthetic synthesis and removal block (ASR), and a dual-agent aesthetic identification block (DAI). The ADP learns the implicit aesthetic transformation between the landmarks of the source image and enhanced image. ASR ensures the consistency of image identity before and after beautification. The DAI distinguishes between the source images and generated images. At the same time, to prevent over-beautification, we constructed a real-world facial wedding photography dataset to enable the model to learn human aesthetics. To evaluate the effectiveness of the AEP-GAN, this paper adopted the wedding photography dataset for training, the SCUT-FBP5500 dataset, and the high-resolution Asian face dataset for testing. Experiments showed that the AEP-GAN addresses the over-beautification problem and achieves excellent results.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Nos. 61972060, 62027827 and 62221005], National Key Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2019YFE0110800), Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing [cstc2020jcyj-zdxmX0025, cstc2019cxcyljrc-td0270].

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    1. Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, No. 2 Chongwen Road, Chongqing, 400065, Chongqing, China

      Huanyu Chen, Weisheng Li, Xinbo Gao & Bin Xiao

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    1. Huanyu Chen
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    Correspondence to Weisheng Li.

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    Chen, H., Li, W., Gao, X. et al. AEP-GAN: Aesthetic Enhanced Perception Generative Adversarial Network for Asian facial beauty synthesis. Appl Intell 53, 20441–20468 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-023-04576-7

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