Segmentation map-to-image translation with GauGAN

GauGAN (named after 19th-century painter Paul Gauguin) is a GAN from Nvidia. Speaking of Nvidia, it is one of the handful of companies that has invested heavily in GANs. They have achieved several breakthroughs in this space, including ProgressiveGAN (we'll cover that in Chapter 7, High Fidelity Face Generation), to generate high-resolution images, and StyleGAN for high-fidelity faces.

Their main business is in making graphics chips rather than AI software. Therefore, unlike some other companies, who keep their code and trained models as closely guarded secrets, Nvidia tends to open source their software code to the general public. They have built a web page (http://nvidia-research-mingyuliu.com/gaugan/) to showcase GauGAN, which can generate photorealistic landscape photos from segmentation maps. The following screenshot is taken from their web page.

Feel free to pause this chapter for a bit and have a play with the application...