IntereStyle: Encoding an Interest Region for Robust StyleGAN Inversion

TL;DR

IntereStyle introduces a novel encoder training scheme that focuses on interest regions in images, improving GAN inversion by reducing distortion and enhancing perceptual quality, especially in complex real-world images.

Contribution

The paper proposes IntereStyle, a new encoder training method that disentangles interest and uninterest regions, addressing the distortion-perception trade-off in GAN inversion.

Findings

Achieves lower distortion and higher perceptual quality than existing encoders.

Robustly preserves original image features for better editing and style mixing.

Effectively filters uninterest region information to improve encoding focus.

Abstract

Recently, manipulation of real-world images has been highly elaborated along with the development of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and corresponding encoders, which embed real-world images into the latent space. However, designing encoders of GAN still remains a challenging task due to the trade-off between distortion and perception. In this paper, we point out that the existing encoders try to lower the distortion not only on the interest region, e.g., human facial region but also on the uninterest region, e.g., background patterns and obstacles. However, most uninterest regions in real-world images are located at out-of-distribution (OOD), which are infeasible to be ideally reconstructed by generative models. Moreover, we empirically find that the uninterest region overlapped with the interest region can mangle the original feature of the interest region, e.g., a microphone overlapped with a facial region is inverted into the white beard. As a result, lowering the distortion of the whole image while maintaining the perceptual quality is very challenging. To overcome this trade-off, we propose a simple yet effective encoder training scheme, coined IntereStyle, which facilitates encoding by focusing on the interest region. IntereStyle steers the encoder to disentangle the encodings of the interest and uninterest regions. To this end, we filter the information of the uninterest region iteratively to regulate the negative impact of the uninterest region. We demonstrate that IntereStyle achieves both lower distortion and higher perceptual quality compared to the existing state-of-the-art encoders. Especially, our model robustly conserves features of the original images, which shows the robust image editing and style mixing results. We will release our code with the pre-trained model after the review.