Chapter 6: AI Painter

In this chapter, we are going to look at two generative adversarial networks (GANs) that could be used to generate and edit images interactively; they are iGAN and GauGAN . The iGAN (interactive GAN) was the first network to demonstrate how to use GANs for interactive image editing and transformation, back in 2016. As GANs were still in fancy at that time, the generated image quality was not impressive as that of today's networks, but the door was opened to the incorporation of GANs into mainstream image editing.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the concepts behind iGANs and some websites that feature video demonstrations of them. There won't be any code in that section. Then, we will go over a more recent award-winning application called GauGAN, produced by Nvidia in 2019, that gives impressive results in converting semantic segmentation masks into real landscape photos.

We will implement GauGAN from scratch, starting with a new normalization...