  Photorealistic frontal view synthesis from a single face image has a wide
range of applications in the field of face recognition. Although data-driven
deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem by seeking
solutions from ample face data, this problem is still challenging because it is
intrinsically ill-posed. This paper proposes a Two-Pathway Generative
Adversarial Network (TP-GAN) for photorealistic frontal view synthesis by
simultaneously perceiving global structures and local details. Four landmark
located patch networks are proposed to attend to local textures in addition to
the commonly used global encoder-decoder network. Except for the novel
architecture, we make this ill-posed problem well constrained by introducing a
combination of adversarial loss, symmetry loss and identity preserving loss.
The combined loss function leverages both frontal face distribution and
pre-trained discriminative deep face models to guide an identity preserving
inference of frontal views from profiles. Different from previous deep learning
methods that mainly rely on intermediate features for recognition, our method
directly leverages the synthesized identity preserving image for downstream
tasks like face recognition and attribution estimation. Experimental results
demonstrate that our method not only presents compelling perceptual results but
also outperforms state-of-the-art results on large pose face recognition.
