Multi Task-Based Facial Expression Synthesis with Supervision Learning and Feature Disentanglement of Image Style

Image-to-Image synthesis paradigms have been widely used for facial expression synthesis. However, current generators are apt to either produce artifacts for largely posed and non-aligned faces or unduly change the identity information like AdaIN-based generator. In this work, we suggest to use image style feature to surrogate the expression cues in the generator, and propose a multi-task learning paradigm to explore this style information via the supervision learning and feature disentanglement. While the supervision learning can make the encoded style specifically represent the expression cues and enable the generator to produce correct expression, the feature disentanglement of content and style cues enables the generator to better preserve the identity information in expression synthesis. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can well reduce the artifacts for the synthesis of posed and non-aligned expressions, and achieves competitive performances in terms of FID, PNSR and classification accuracy, compared with four publicly available GANs. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lumanxi236/MTSS.