Object-stable unsupervised dual contrastive learning image-to-image translation with query-selected attention and convolutional block attention module.

Recently, contrastive learning has gained popularity in the field of unsupervised image-to-image (I2I) translation. In a previous study, a query-selected attention (QS-Attn) module, which employed an attention matrix with a probability distribution, was used to maximize the mutual information between the source and translated images. This module selected significant queries using an entropy metric computed from the attention matrix. However, it often selected many queries with equal significance measures, leading to an excessive focus on the background. In this study, we proposed a dual-learning framework with QS-Attn and convolutional block attention module (CBAM) called object-stable dual contrastive learning generative adversarial network (OS-DCLGAN). In this paper, we utilize a CBAM, which learns what and where to emphasize or suppress, thereby refining intermediate features effectively. This CBAM was integrated before the QS-Attn module to capture significant domain information for I2I translation tasks. The proposed framework outperformed recently introduced approaches in various I2I translation tasks, showing its effectiveness and versatility. The code is available at https://github.com/RedPotatoChip/OSUDL.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Oh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)