JigsawGAN: Self-supervised Learning for Solving Jigsaw Puzzles with Generative Adversarial Networks

The paper proposes a solution based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for solving jigsaw puzzles. The problem assumes that an image is cut into equal square pieces, and asks to recover the image according to pieces information. Conventional jigsaw solvers often determine piece relationships based on the piece boundaries, which ignore the important semantic information. In this paper, we propose JigsawGAN, a GAN-based self-supervised method for solving jigsaw puzzles with unpaired images (with no prior knowledge of the initial images). We design a multi-task pipeline that includes, (1) a classification branch to classify jigsaw permutations, and (2) a GAN branch to recover features to images with correct orders. The classification branch is constrained by the pseudo-labels generated according to the shuffled pieces. The GAN branch concentrates on the image semantic information, among which the generator produces the natural images to fool the discriminator with reassembled pieces, while the discriminator distinguishes whether a given image belongs to the synthesized or the real target manifold. These two branches are connected by a flow-based warp that is applied to warp features to correct order according to the classification results. The proposed method can solve jigsaw puzzles more efficiently by utilizing both semantic information and edge information simultaneously. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons against several leading prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our method.