2023/01/12 by Yinghao Xu, Yujun Shen, Xu, Yinghao +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Face recognition and analysis #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.05315
openalex publication_date 2023/01/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent years witness the tremendous success of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in synthesizing photo-realistic images. GAN generator learns to compose realistic images and reproduce the real data distribution. Through that, a hierarchical visual feature with multi-level semantics spontaneously emerges. In this work we investigate that such a generative feature learned from image synthesis exhibits great potentials in solving a wide range of computer vision tasks, including both generative ones and more importantly discriminative ones. We first train an encoder by considering the pretrained StyleGAN generator as a learned loss function. The visual features produced by our encoder, termed as Generative Hierarchical Features (GH-Feat), highly align with the layer-wise GAN representations, and hence describe the input image adequately from the reconstruction perspective. Extensive experiments support the versatile transferability of GH-Feat across a range of applications, such as image editing, image processing, image harmonization, face verification, landmark detection, layout prediction, image retrieval, etc. We further show that, through a proper spatial expansion, our developed GH-Feat can also facilitate fine-grained semantic segmentation using only a few annotations. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the appealing performance of GH-Feat.