I have trained StyleGAN2 from scratch with a dataset of female portraits at 1024px resolution. The samples quality was further improved by tuning the parameters and augmenting the dataset with zoomed-in images, allowing the network to learn more details and to achieved FID metrics that are comparable to the results of the original work…I was curious how it would work on the human anatomy, so I decided to try to train SG2 with a dataset of head and shoulders portraits. To alleviate capacity issues mentioned in the SG2 paper I preferred to use portraits without clothes (a substantial contributing factor to dataset variance); furthermore, the dataset was limited to just one gender in order to further reduce the dataset’s complexity.
…I haven’t quite been able to achieve the quality of SG2 trained with the FFHQ dataset. After over than 30,000 kimg, the samples are not yet as detailed as it is desirable. For example, teeth look blurry and pupils are not perfectly round. Considering the size of my dataset as opposed to the FFHQ one, the cause is unlikely to be the lack of training data. Continuing the training does not appear to help as is evident from the plateau in FIDs.
Overall, my experience with SG2 is well in line with what others are observing. Limiting the dataset to a single domain leads to major quality improvements. SG2 is able to model textures and transitions quite well. At the same time it is struggling as the complexity of the object increases with, for instance, greater diversity in poses. It should be noted that SG2 is much more efficient for single domain tasks compared to other architectures, resulting in acceptable results much faster.
