TC-GAN

Face frontalization has always been an important field. Recently, with the introduction of generative adversarial networks (GANs), face frontalization has achieved remarkable success. A critical challenge during face frontalization is to ensure the features of the original profile image are retained. Even though some state-of-the-art methods can preserve identity features while rotating the face to the frontal view, they still have difficulty preserving facial expression features. Therefore, we propose the novel triangle cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks for the face frontalization task, termed TC-GAN. Our networks contain two generators and one discriminator. One of the generators generates the frontal contour, and the other generates the facial features. They work together to generate a photo-realistic frontal view of the face. We also introduce cycle-consistent loss to retain feature information effectively. To validate the advantages of TC-GAN, we apply it to the face frontalization task on two datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can perform large-pose face frontalization while preserving the facial features (both identity and expression). To the best of our knowledge, TC-GAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the preservation of facial identity and expression features during face frontalization.