Image translation with pix2pix
The introduction of pix2pix in 2017 caused quite a stir, not only within the research community, but also the wider population. This can be attributed in part to the https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/ website, which puts the models online and allows people to translate their sketches into cats, shoes, and bags. You should try it too! The following screenshot is taken from their website to give you a glimpse of how it works:
Figure 4.8 – Application of turning a sketch of a cat into a real image (Source: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/)
Pix2pix came from a research paper entitled Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks. From the paper title, we can tell that pix2pix is a conditional GAN that performs image-to-image translation. The model can be trained to perform general image translation, but we will need to have image pairs in the dataset. In our pix2pix implementation, we will translate masks of...
