Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation (SIGGRAPH 2021)

Recently, there has been a surge of diverse methods for performing image editing by employing pre-trained unconditional generators. Applying these methods on real images, however, remains a challenge, as it necessarily requires the inversion of the images into their latent space. To successfully invert a real image, one needs to find a latent code that reconstructs the input image accurately, and more importantly, allows for its meaningful manipulation. In this paper, we carefully study the latent space of StyleGAN, the state-of-the-art unconditional generator. We identify and analyze the existence of a distortion-editability tradeoff and a distortion-perception tradeoff within the StyleGAN latent space. We then suggest two principles for designing encoders in a manner that allows one to control the proximity of the inversions to regions that StyleGAN was originally trained on. We present an encoder based on our two principles that is specifically designed for facilitating editing on real images by balancing these tradeoffs. By evaluating its performance qualitatively and quantitatively on numerous challenging domains, including cars and horses, we show that our inversion method, followed by common editing techniques, achieves superior real-image editing quality, with only a small reconstruction accuracy drop.

Description

Official Implementation of "Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation" paper for both training and evaluation. The e4e encoder is specifically designed to complement existing image manipulation techniques performed over StyleGAN's latent space.

Recent Updates

2021.08.17: Add single style code encoder (use --encoder_type SingleStyleCodeEncoder).
2021.03.25: Add pose editing direction.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Linux or macOS
• NVIDIA GPU + CUDA CuDNN (CPU may be possible with some modifications, but is not inherently supported)
• Python 3

Installation

• Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/omertov/encoder4editing.git
cd encoder4editing

• Dependencies:
  We recommend running this repository using Anaconda. All dependencies for defining the environment are provided in environment/e4e_env.yaml.

Inference Notebook

We provide a Jupyter notebook found in notebooks/inference_playground.ipynb that allows one to encode and perform several editings on real images using StyleGAN.

Pretrained Models

Please download the pre-trained models from the following links. Each e4e model contains the entire pSp framework architecture, including the encoder and decoder weights.

If you wish to use one of the pretrained models for training or inference, you may do so using the flag --checkpoint_path.

In addition, we provide various auxiliary models needed for training your own e4e model from scratch.

By default, we assume that all auxiliary models are downloaded and saved to the directory pretrained_models. However, you may use your own paths by changing the necessary values in configs/path_configs.py.

Training

To train the e4e encoder, make sure the paths to the required models, as well as training and testing data is configured in configs/path_configs.py and configs/data_configs.py.

Training the e4e Encoder

python scripts/train.py \
--dataset_type cars_encode \
--exp_dir new/experiment/directory \
--start_from_latent_avg \
--use_w_pool \
--w_discriminator_lambda 0.1 \
--progressive_start 20000 \
--id_lambda 0.5 \
--val_interval 10000 \
--max_steps 200000 \
--stylegan_size 512 \
--stylegan_weights path/to/pretrained/stylegan.pt \
--workers 8 \
--batch_size 8 \
--test_batch_size 4 \
--test_workers 4 

Training on your own dataset

In order to train the e4e encoder on a custom dataset, perform the following adjustments:

1. Insert the paths to your train and test data into the dataset_paths variable defined in configs/paths_config.py:

dataset_paths = {
    'my_train_data': '/path/to/train/images/directory',
    'my_test_data': '/path/to/test/images/directory'
}

2. Configure a new dataset under the DATASETS variable defined in configs/data_configs.py:

DATASETS = {
   'my_data_encode': {
        'transforms': transforms_config.EncodeTransforms,
        'train_source_root': dataset_paths['my_train_data'],
        'train_target_root': dataset_paths['my_train_data'],
        'test_source_root': dataset_paths['my_test_data'],
        'test_target_root': dataset_paths['my_test_data']
    }
}

Refer to configs/transforms_config.py for the transformations applied to the train and test images during training.

3. Finally, run a training session with --dataset_type my_data_encode.

Inference

Having trained your model, you can use scripts/inference.py to apply the model on a set of images.
For example,

python scripts/inference.py \
--images_dir=/path/to/images/directory \
--save_dir=/path/to/saving/directory \
path/to/checkpoint.pt 

Latent Editing Consistency (LEC)

As described in the paper, we suggest a new metric, Latent Editing Consistency (LEC), for evaluating the encoder's performance. We provide an example for calculating the metric over the FFHQ StyleGAN using the aging editing direction in metrics/LEC.py.

To run the example:

cd metrics
python LEC.py \
--images_dir=/path/to/images/directory \
path/to/checkpoint.pt 

Acknowledgments

This code borrows heavily from pixel2style2pixel

Citation

If you use this code for your research, please cite our paper Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation:

@article{tov2021designing,
  title={Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation},
  author={Tov, Omer and Alaluf, Yuval and Nitzan, Yotam and Patashnik, Or and Cohen-Or, Daniel},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.02766},
  year={2021}
}