In plain words: Instead of writing a sentence, you list objects and how they relate; the system turns that map into boxes and outlines for each object, then paints a realistic picture from the plan. In user studies, it handled many-object scenes better than text-based image generators.
Abstract
To truly understand the visual world our models should be able not only to recognize images but also generate them. To this end, there has been exciting recent progress on generating images from natural language descriptions. These methods give stunning results on limited domains such as descriptions of birds or flowers, but struggle to faithfully reproduce complex sentences with many objects and relationships. To overcome this limitation we propose a method for generating images from scene graphs, enabling explicitly reasoning about objects and their relationships. Our model uses graph convolution to process input graphs, computes a scene layout by predicting bounding boxes and segmentation masks for objects, and converts the layout to an image with a cascaded refinement network. The network is trained adversarially against a pair of discriminators to ensure realistic outputs. We validate our approach on Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff, where qualitative results, ablations, and user studies demonstrate our method's ability to generate complex images with multiple objects.
Justin Johnson, Agrim Gupta, Li Fei-Fei
arXiv:1804.01622 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Apr 4, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · To appear at CVPR 2018