Sketch-to-photo face generation based on semantic consistency preserving and similar connected component refinement

Sketch-to-photo face generation has recently gained remarkable attention in computer vision and signal processing communities, because the sketches that employ concise lines are easily available and can describe significant facial attributes conveniently. Most existing sketch-to-photo works fail to maintain geometric structures and improve local details simultaneously, which limits their performance. In this work, we propose a two-stage sketch-to-photo generative adversarial network for face generation. In the first stage, we propose a semantic loss to maintain semantic consistency. In the second stage, we define the similar connected component and propose a color refinement loss to generate fine-grained details. Moreover, we introduce a multi-scale discriminator and design a patch-level local discriminator. We also propose a texture loss to enhance the local fidelity of synthesized images. Experiments show that our proposed method can significantly generate better results while preserving facial attributes than the state-of-the-art methods.