  Despite remarkable advances in image synthesis research, existing works often
fail in manipulating images under the context of large geometric
transformations. Synthesizing person images conditioned on arbitrary poses is
one of the most representative examples where the generation quality largely
relies on the capability of identifying and modeling arbitrary transformations
on different body parts. Current generative models are often built on local
convolutions and overlook the key challenges (e.g. heavy occlusions, different
views or dramatic appearance changes) when distinct geometric changes happen
for each part, caused by arbitrary pose manipulations. This paper aims to
resolve these challenges induced by geometric variability and spatial
displacements via a new Soft-Gated Warping Generative Adversarial Network
(Warping-GAN), which is composed of two stages: 1) it first synthesizes a
target part segmentation map given a target pose, which depicts the
region-level spatial layouts for guiding image synthesis with higher-level
structure constraints; 2) the Warping-GAN equipped with a soft-gated
warping-block learns feature-level mapping to render textures from the original
image into the generated segmentation map. Warping-GAN is capable of
controlling different transformation degrees given distinct target poses.
Moreover, the proposed warping-block is light-weight and flexible enough to be
injected into any networks. Human perceptual studies and quantitative
evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our Warping-GAN that significantly
outperforms all existing methods on two large datasets.
