EdgeGAN: One-way mapping generative adversarial network based on the edge information for unpaired training set

Abstract Image conversion has attracted mounting attention due to its practical applications. This paper proposes a lightweight network structure that can implement unpaired training sets to complete one-way image mapping, based on the generative adversarial network (GAN) and a fixed-parameter edge detection convolution kernel. Compared with the cycle consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN), the proposed network features simpler structure, fewer parameters (only 37.48% of the parameters in CycleGAN), and less training cost (only 35.47% of the GPU memory usage and 17.67% of the single iteration time in CycleGAN). Remarkably, the cyclic consistency becomes not mandatory for ensuring the consistency of the content before and after image mapping. This network has achieved significant processing effects in some image translation tasks, and its effectiveness and validity have been well demonstrated through typical experiments. In the quantitative classification evaluation based on VGG-16, the algorithm proposed in this paper has achieved superior performance.