GANEx: A complete pipeline of training, inference and benchmarking GAN experiments

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) is one of the standard methods in the field of multimedia research to perform data classification, detection, segmentation and generation. Within DL, generative adversarial networks (GANs) represents a new and highly popular branch of methods. GANs have the capability to generate, from random noise or conditional input, new data realizations within the dataset population. While generation is popular and highly useful in itself, GANs can also be useful to improve supervised DL. GAN-based approaches can, for example, perform segmentation or create synthetic data for training other DL models. The latter one is especially interesting in domains where not much training data exists such as medical multimedia. In this respect, performing a series of experiments involving GANs can be very time consuming due to the lack of tools that support the whole pipeline such as structured training, testing and tracking of different architectures and configurations. Moreover, the success of generative models is highly dependent on hyper-parameter optimization and statistical analysis in the design and fine-tuning stages. In this paper, we present a new tool called GANEx for making the whole pipeline of training, inference and benchmarking GANs faster, more efficient and more structured. The tool consists of a special library called FastGAN which allows designing generative models very fast. Moreover, GANEx has a graphical user interface to support structured experimenting, quick hyper-parameter configurations and output analysis. The presented tool is not limited to a specific DL framework and can be therefore even used to compare the performance of cross frameworks.