# FurryGAN: High Quality Foreground-aware Image Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [StyleNeRF: A Style-based 3D-Aware Generator for High-resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08985/) (2021)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Closed-Form Factorization of Latent Semantics in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06600/) (2020)
- [InterFaceGAN: Interpreting the Disentangled Face Representation Learned by GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09635/) (2020)
- [StyleFlow: Attribute-conditioned Exploration of StyleGAN-Generated Images using Conditional Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02401/) (2020)
- [StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12799/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03754/) (2020)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Editing in Style: Uncovering the Local Semantics of GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14367/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Car Dataset for Fine-Grained Categorization and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08959/) (2015)
- [Exploiting Spatial Dimensions of Latent in GAN for Real-time Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14754/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08247/) (2020)
- [FineGAN: Unsupervised Hierarchical Disentanglement for Fine-Grained Object Generation and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11155/) (2018)
- [Emergence of Object Segmentation in Perturbed Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12663/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Hadamard product in deep learning: Introduction, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13112/) (2025)
- [BallGAN: 3D-aware Image Synthesis with a Spherical Background](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09091/) (2023)
- [Adversarially-Guided Portrait Matting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02981/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Segmentation as Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04528/) (2023)
- [Out-of-domain GAN inversion via Invertibility Decomposition for Photo-Realistic Human Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09262/) (2022)
- [BFS: Back-to-Front Layered Image Synthesis via Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24894/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foreground-aware image synthesis aims to generate images as well as their foreground masks. A common approach is to formulate an image as an masked blending of a foreground image and a background image. It is a challenging problem because it is prone to reach the trivial solution where either image overwhelms the other, i.e., the masks become completely full or empty, and the foreground and background are not meaningfully separated. We present FurryGAN with three key components: 1) imposing both the foreground image and the composite image to be realistic, 2) designing a mask as a combination of coarse and fine masks, and 3) guiding the generator by an auxiliary mask predictor in the discriminator. Our method produces realistic images with remarkably detailed alpha masks which cover hair, fur, and whiskers in a fully unsupervised manner.