# FBC-GAN: Diverse and Flexible Image Synthesis via Foreground-Background Composition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03166 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03166/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [Cross-domain Correspondence Learning for Exemplar-based Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05571/) (2020)
- [Image Generation from Layout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11389/) (2018)
- [ST-GAN: Spatial Transformer Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01837/) (2018)
- [Diverse Image Inpainting with Bidirectional and Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12335/) (2021)
- [ESIR: End-to-end Scene Text Recognition via Iterative Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05824/) (2018)
- [Scribbler: Controlling Deep Image Synthesis with Sketch and Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00835/) (2016)
- [Defect-GAN: High-Fidelity Defect Synthesis for Automated Defect Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15158/) (2021)
- [Spatial Fusion GAN for Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05840/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GenCo: Generative Co-training for Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01254/) (2021)
- [Text-Conditioned Background Generation for Editable Multi-Layer Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17151/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become the de-facto standard in image synthesis. However, without considering the foreground-background decomposition, existing GANs tend to capture excessive content correlation between foreground and background, thus constraining the diversity in image generation. This paper presents a novel Foreground-Background Composition GAN (FBC-GAN) that performs image generation by generating foreground objects and background scenes concurrently and independently, followed by composing them with style and geometrical consistency. With this explicit design, FBC-GAN can generate images with foregrounds and backgrounds that are mutually independent in contents, thus lifting the undesirably learned content correlation constraint and achieving superior diversity. It also provides excellent flexibility by allowing the same foreground object with different background scenes, the same background scene with varying foreground objects, or the same foreground object and background scene with different object positions, sizes and poses. It can compose foreground objects and background scenes sampled from different datasets as well. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets show that FBC-GAN achieves competitive visual realism and superior diversity as compared with state-of-the-art methods.