Full-Resolution Correspondence Learning for Image Translation

We present the full-resolution correspondence learning for cross-domain images, which aids image translation. We adopt a hierarchical strategy that uses the correspondence from coarse level to guide the finer levels. In each hierarchy, the correspondence can be efficiently computed via PatchMatch that iteratively leverages the matchings from the neighborhood. Within each PatchMatch iteration, the ConvGRU module is employed to refine the current correspondence considering not only the matchings of larger context but also the historic estimates. The proposed GRU-assisted PatchMatch is fully differentiable and highly efficient. When jointly trained with image translation, full-resolution semantic correspondence can be established in an unsupervised manner, which in turn facilitates the exemplar-based image translation. Experiments on diverse translation tasks show our approach performs considerably better than state-of-the-arts on producing high-resolution images.