Efficient High-Resolution Image-to-Image Translation using Multi-Scale Gradient U-Net

Abstract: Recently, Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (Conditional GAN) have shown very promising performance in several image-to-image translation applications. However, the uses of these conditional GANs are quite limited to low-resolution images, such as 256X256.The Pix2Pix-HD is a recent attempt to utilize the conditional GAN for high-resolution image synthesis. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scale Gradient based U-Net (MSG U-Net) model for high-resolution image-to-image translation up to 2048X1024 resolution. The proposed model is trained by allowing the flow of gradients from multiple-discriminators to a single generator at multiple scales. The proposed MSG U-Net architecture leads to photo-realistic high-resolution image-to-image translation. Moreover, the proposed model is computationally efficient as com-pared to the Pix2Pix-HD with an improvement in the inference time nearly by 2.5 times. We provide the code of MSG U-Net model at https://github.com/laxmaniron/MSG-U-Net.