Terrain Scene Generation Using a Lightweight Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network

Natural terrain scene images play important roles in the geographical research and application. However, it is challenging to collect a large set of terrain scene images. Recently, great progress has been made in image generation. Although impressive results can be achieved, the efficiency of the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., the Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (VQGAN), is still dissatisfying. The VQGAN confronts two issues, i.e., high space complexity and heavy computational demand. To efficiently fulfill the terrain scene generation task, we first collect a Natural Terrain Scene Data Set (NTSD), which contains 36,672 images divided into 38 classes. Then we propose a Lightweight VQGAN (Lit-VQGAN), which uses the fewer parameters and has the lower computational complexity, compared with the VQGAN. A lightweight super-resolution network is further adopted, to speedily derive a high-resolution image from the image that the Lit-VQGAN generates. The Lit-VQGAN can be trained and tested on the NTSD. To our knowledge, either the NTSD or the Lit-VQGAN has not been exploited before.¹ Experimental results show that the Lit-VQGAN is more efficient and effective than the VQGAN for the image generation task. These promising results should be due to the lightweight yet effective networks that we design.