Let's first understand a few historical developments prior to the invention of StyleGAN. As we know, generating fake faces from the previous chapter involved the usage of GANs. The biggest problem that research faced was that the images that could be generated were small (typically 64 x 64). And any effort to generate images of a larger size caused the generators or discriminators to fall into local minima that would stop training and generate gibberish. One of the major leaps in generating high-quality images involved a research paper called ProGAN (short for Progressive GAN), which involved a clever trick.
The size of both the generator and discriminator is progressively increased. In the first step, you create a generator and discriminator to generate 4 x 4 images from a latent vector. After this, additional convolution (and upscaling) layers are added to the trained generator and discriminator, which will be responsible for accepting the...