Style Neutralization Generative Adversarial Classifier

Breathtaking improvement has been seen with the recently proposed deep Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Purposes of most existing GAN-based models majorly concentrate on generating realistic and vivid patterns by a pattern generator with the aid of the binary discriminator. However, few study were related to the promotion of classification performance with merits of those generated ones. In this paper, a novel and generalized classification framework called Style Neutralization Generative Adversarial Classifier (SN-GAC), based on the GAN framework, is introduced to enhance the classification accuracy by neutralizing possible inconsistent style information existing in the original data. In the proposed model, the generator of SN-GAC is trained by mapping the original patterns with certain styles (source) to their style-neutralized or standard counterparts (standard-target), capable of generating the targeted style-neutralized one (generated-target). On the other hand, pairs of both standard (source + standard-target) and generated (source + generated-target) patterns are fed into the discriminator, optimized by not only distinguishing between real and fake, but also classifying the input pairs with correct class label assignment. Empirical experiments fully demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SN-GAC framework by achieving so-far the highest accuracy on two benchmark classification databases including the face and the Chinese handwriting character, outperforming several relevant state-of-the-art baseline approaches.