Applications and limits of image-to-image translation models

Image-to-image (I2I) translation models are widely employed in several fields, e.g., computer vision, security or medicine. Their goal is to map images from a source domain to a target domain while preserving content information. Despite their success, these models suffer from multiple weaknesses. For example, many practical scenarios do not consent to collect a sufficient amount of images, leading to imbalanced domains. Furthermore, mode collapse and training instability require a careful design and further discourage their deployment on edge devices. Finally, I2I models need an intensive computation to learn conditional probability distributions and are difficult to adapt to different contexts. These drawbacks mainly limit their large scale applicability. In this work, we want to shed light on the main solutions adopted to overcome the above issues and their impact on the performance. We also investigate several approaches to deploy these models on low-powered devices and weight sharing techniques to reduce the number of parameters and resources used.