Getting started with GAN models

One of the most amazing applications of GANs is generation. Just look at the following picture of a girl; can you guess whether she is real or simply generated by a machine?

Figure 6.1 – Fake face generation using StyleGAN (image credit – https://thispersondoesnotexist.com)

Creating such incredibly realistic faces is one of the most successful use cases of GANs. However, GANs are not limited to just generating pretty faces or deepfake videos; they also have key commercial applications as well, such as generating images of houses or creating new models of cars or paintings.

While generative models have been used in the past in statistics, deep generative models such as GANs are relatively new. Deep generative models also include Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and auto-regressive models. However, with GAN being the most popular method, we will focus on them here.

What is a GAN?

Interestingly, GAN originated...