Warping the Residuals for Image Editing with StyleGAN

Abstract: StyleGAN models show editing capabilities via their semantically interpretable latent organizations which require successful GAN inversion methods to edit real images. Many works have been proposed for inverting images into StyleGAN's latent space. However, their results either suffer from low fidelity to the input image or poor editing qualities, especially for edits that require large transformations. That is because low-rate latent spaces lose many image details due to the information bottleneck even though it provides an editable space. On the other hand, higher-rate latent spaces can pass all the image details to StyleGAN for perfect reconstruction of images but suffer from low editing qualities. In this work, we present a novel image inversion architecture that extracts high-rate latent features and includes a flow estimation module to warp these features to adapt them to edits. The flows are estimated from StyleGAN features of edited and unedited latent codes. By estimating the high-rate features and warping them for edits, we achieve both high-fidelity to the input image and high-quality edits. We run extensive experiments and compare our method with state-of-the-art inversion methods. Qualitative metrics and visual comparisons show significant improvements.