  In this paper, we address unsupervised pose-guided person image generation,
which is known challenging due to non-rigid deformation. Unlike previous
methods learning a rock-hard direct mapping between human bodies, we propose a
new pathway to decompose the hard mapping into two more accessible subtasks,
namely, semantic parsing transformation and appearance generation. Firstly, a
semantic generative network is proposed to transform between semantic parsing
maps, in order to simplify the non-rigid deformation learning. Secondly, an
appearance generative network learns to synthesize semantic-aware textures.
Thirdly, we demonstrate that training our framework in an end-to-end manner
further refines the semantic maps and final results accordingly. Our method is
generalizable to other semantic-aware person image generation tasks, eg,
clothing texture transfer and controlled image manipulation. Experimental
results demonstrate the superiority of our method on DeepFashion and
Market-1501 datasets, especially in keeping the clothing attributes and better
body shapes.
