Facial recognition using deep convolutional neural networks relies on the availability of large datasets of face images. Many examples of identities are needed, and for each identity, a large variety of images are needed in order for the network to learn robustness to intra-class variation. In practice, such datasets are difficult to obtain, particularly those containing adequate variation of pose. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) provide a potential solution to this problem due to their ability to generate realistic, synthetic images. However, recent studies have shown that current methods of disentangling pose from identity are inadequate. In this work we incorporate a 3D morphable model into the generator of a GAN in order to learn a nonlinear texture model from in-the-wild images. This allows generation of new, synthetic identities, and manipulation of pose, illumination and expression without compromising the identity. Our synthesised data is used to augment training of facial recognition networks with performance evaluated on the challenging CFP and CPLFW datasets.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are able to learn mappings between simple, relatively low-dimensional, random distributions and points on the manifold of realistic images in image-space. The semantics of this mapping, however, are typically entangled such that meaningful image properties cannot be controlled independently of one another. Conditional GANs (cGANs) provide a potential solution to this problem, allowing specific semantics to be enforced during training. This solution, however, depends on the availability of precise labels, which are sometimes difficult or near impossible to obtain, e.g. labels representing lighting conditions or describing the background. In this paper we introduce a new formulation of the cGAN that is able to learn disentangled, multivariate models of semantically meaningful variation and which has the advantage of requiring only the weak supervision of binary attribute labels. For example, given only labels of ambient / non-ambient lighting, our method is able to learn multivariate lighting models disentangled from other factors such as the identity and pose. We coin the method intra-class variation isolation (IVI) and the resulting network the IVI-GAN. We evaluate IVI-GAN on the CelebA dataset and on synthetic 3D morphable model data, learning to disentangle attributes such as lighting, pose, expression, and even the background.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are now capable of producing synthetic face images of exceptionally high visual quality. In parallel to the development of GANs themselves, efforts have been made to develop metrics to objectively assess the characteristics of the synthetic images, mainly focusing on visual quality and the variety of images. Little work has been done, however, to assess overfitting of GANs and their ability to generate new identities. In this paper we apply a state of the art biometric network to various datasets of synthetic images and perform a thorough assessment of their identity-related characteristics. We conclude that GANs can indeed be used to generate new, imagined identities meaning that applications such as anonymisation of image sets and augmentation of training datasets with distractor images are viable applications. We also assess the ability of GANs to disentangle identity from other image characteristics and propose a novel GAN triplet loss that we show to improve this disentanglement.