Recently introduced generative adversarial network (GAN) has been shown numerous promising results to generate realistic samples. The essential task of GAN is to control the features of samples generated from a random distribution. While the current GAN structures, such as conditional GAN, successfully generate samples with desired major features, they often fail to produce detailed features that bring specific differences among samples. To overcome this limitation, here we propose a controllable GAN (ControlGAN) structure. By separating a feature classifier from a discriminator, the generator of ControlGAN is designed to learn generating synthetic samples with the specific detailed features. Evaluated with multiple image datasets, ControlGAN shows a power to generate improved samples with well-controlled features. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ControlGAN can generate intermediate features and opposite features for interpolated and extrapolated input labels that are not used in the training process. It implies that ControlGAN can significantly contribute to the variety of generated samples.

A fully revised version of this paper is published in IEEE Access. Please refer to https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2899108