LDSGAN: Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation With Long-Domain Search GAN for Generating High-Quality Anime Images

Abstract

Image-to-image (I2I) translation has emerged as a valuable tool for privacy protection in the digital age, offering effective ways to safeguard portrait rights in cyberspace. In addition, I2I translation is applied in real-world tasks such as image synthesis, super-resolution, virtual fitting, and virtual live streaming. Traditional I2I translation models demonstrate strong performance when handling similar datasets. However, when the domain distance between two datasets is large, translation quality may degrade significantly due to notable differences in image shape and edges. To address this issue, we propose Long-Domain Search GAN (LDSGAN), an unsupervised I2I translation network that employs a GAN structure as its backbone, incorporating a novel Real-Time Routing Search (RTRS) module and Sketch Loss. Specifically, RTRS aids in expanding the search space within the target domain, aligning feature projection with images closest to the optimization target. Additionally, Sketch Loss retains human visual similarity during long-domain distance translation. Experimental results indicate that LDSGAN surpasses existing I2I translation models in both image quality and semantic similarity between input and generated images, as reflected by its mean FID and LPIPS scores of 31.509 and 0.581, respectively.