Transformer-Based Generative Adversarial Networks in Computer Vision: A Comprehensive Survey

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been very successful for synthesizing the images in a given dataset. The artificially generated images by GANs are very realistic. The GANs have shown potential usability in several computer vision applications, including image generation, image-to-image translation, and video synthesis. Conventionally, the generator network is the backbone of GANs, which generates the samples, and the discriminator network is used to facilitate the training of the generator network. The generator and discriminator networks are usually a convolutional neural network (CNN). The convolution-based networks exploit the local relationship in a layer, which requires the deep networks to extract the abstract features. However, recently developed transformer networks are able to exploit the global relationship with tremendous performance improvement for several problems in computer vision. Motivated from the success of transformer networks and GANs, recent works have tried to exploit the transformers in GAN framework for the image/video synthesis. This article presents a comprehensive survey on the developments and advancements in GANs utilizing the transformer networks for computer vision applications. The performance comparison for several applications on benchmark datasets is also performed and analyzed. The conducted survey will be very useful to understand the research trends and gaps related with transformer-based GANs and to develop the advanced GAN architectures by exploiting the global and local relationships for different applications.