Novel Generative Adversarial Network Architectures for Generating image Data

<p>High data collection costs and complicated data access regulations increase the demand for synthetic data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a novel generative framework with great potential for high quality synthetic data generation. GANs formulate the true distribution of data implicitly, and the success of GANs are often measured based on the similarity of generated data to this true distribution. GANs were originally designed to work with continuous data. However, many important real-world datasets such as medical images involve discontinuous distributions. GAN training for discontinuous distributions is relatively more challenging, as the training procedure often suffers from instability and mode collapse issues. This dissertation focuses on designing novel GAN architectures to generate representative synthetic image data, and proposes new structures to alleviate GANs' mode collapse issue. As part of this thesis, novel applications of image data generation with GANs have been also investigated for important problems arising in the telecommunication industry and medical domain. Specifically, we first explore various GAN structures to generate engineered electromagnetic surfaces. We consider the continuous approximation of the data and explore the capabilities of feed-forward and convolutional GANs for synthetic data generation. Next, we introduce a novel GAN architecture to address the problem of mode collapse in GAN training. The proposed structure incorporates a third network that penalizes the generator for generating low diversity samples. Lastly, we study the challenging problem of object generation in 3D space using GANs, and we propose extensions to existing 3D GAN structures to generate connected 3D volumes. Additionally, we explore a more challenging version of this 3D volume generation problem by generating connected volumes packed with spheres. This research has applications in radiosurgery treatment planning, and the proposed 3D GAN structure can help generate rare, unseen 3D tumor volumes and information on how to treat these tumors. Accordingly, our analysis contributes to overcoming data scarcity issues (e.g., due to privacy considerations) for an important practical problem in the medical domain.</p>