GAN Inversion: A Survey

GAN inversion aims to invert a given image back into the latent space of a pretrained GAN model so that the image can be faithfully reconstructed from the inverted code by the generator. As an emerging technique to bridge the real and fake image domains, GAN inversion plays an essential role in enabling pretrained GAN models, such as StyleGAN and BigGAN, for applications of real image editing. Moreover, GAN inversion interprets GAN's latent space and examines how realistic images can be generated. In this paper, we provide a survey of GAN inversion with a focus on its representative algorithms and its applications in image restoration and image manipulation. We further discuss the trends and challenges for future research. A curated list of GAN inversion methods, datasets, and other related information can be found at https://github.com/weihaox/awesome-gan-inversion.