In plain words: Video generators are judged on whether frame-to-frame changes look real, and a forward-then-backward playback check catches errors that pile up over time. Unlike usual squared-error training, which smooths motion but blurs detail, this keeps frames sharp and steady in video super-resolution and style transfer.
Abstract · Learning Temporal Coherence via Self-Supervision for GAN-based Video Generation
Our work explores temporal self-supervision for GAN-based video generation tasks. While adversarial training successfully yields generative models for a variety of areas, temporal relationships in the generated data are much less explored. Natural temporal changes are crucial for sequential generation tasks, e.g. video super-resolution and unpaired video translation. For the former, state-of-the-art methods often favor simpler norm losses such as $L^2$ over adversarial training. However, their averaging nature easily leads to temporally smooth results with an undesirable lack of spatial detail. For unpaired video translation, existing approaches modify the generator networks to form spatio-temporal cycle consistencies. In contrast, we focus on improving learning objectives and propose a temporally self-supervised algorithm. For both tasks, we show that temporal adversarial learning is key to achieving temporally coherent solutions without sacrificing spatial detail. We also propose a novel Ping-Pong loss to improve the long-term temporal consistency. It effectively prevents recurrent networks from accumulating artifacts temporally without depressing detailed features. Additionally, we propose a first set of metrics to quantitatively evaluate the accuracy as well as the perceptual quality of the temporal evolution. A series of user studies confirm the rankings computed with these metrics. Code, data, models, and results are provided at https://github.com/thunil/TecoGAN. The project page https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/2019-tecogan-chu/ contains supplemental materials.
Mengyu Chu, You Xie, Jonas Mayer, Laura Leal-Taixé, Nils Thuerey
arXiv:1811.09393 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Nov 23, 2018 · updated May 21, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Project page: https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/2019-tecogan-chu/, code link: https://github.com/thunil/TecoGAN