  Facial landmarks constitute the most compressed representation of faces and
are known to preserve information such as pose, gender and facial structure
present in the faces. Several works exist that attempt to perform high-level
face-related analysis tasks based on landmarks. In contrast, in this work, an
attempt is made to tackle the inverse problem of synthesizing faces from their
respective landmarks. The primary aim of this work is to demonstrate that
information preserved by landmarks (gender in particular) can be further
accentuated by leveraging generative models to synthesize corresponding faces.
Though the problem is particularly challenging due to its ill-posed nature, we
believe that successful synthesis will enable several applications such as
boosting performance of high-level face related tasks using landmark points and
performing dataset augmentation. To this end, a novel face-synthesis method
known as Gender Preserving Generative Adversarial Network (GP-GAN) that is
guided by adversarial loss, perceptual loss and a gender preserving loss is
presented. Further, we propose a novel generator sub-network UDeNet for GP-GAN
that leverages advantages of U-Net and DenseNet architectures. Extensive
experiments and comparison with recent methods are performed to verify the
effectiveness of the proposed method.
