Self-Supervised Dense Consistency Regularization for Image-to-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation has gained considerable attention due to recent impressive advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs). This paper presents a simple but effective regularization technique for improving GAN-based image-to-image translation. To generate images with realistic local semantics and structures, we propose an auxiliary self-supervision loss that enforces point-wise consistency of the overlapping region between a pair of patches cropped from a single real image during training the discriminator of a GAN. Our experiment shows that the proposed dense consistency regularization improves performance substantially on various image-to-image translation scenarios. It also leads to extra performance gains through the combination with instance-level regularization methods. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed model captures domain-specific characteristics more effectively with only a small fraction of training data.