Semantic Image Synthesis via Diffusion Models
Existing GAN-based semantic image synthesis methods suffer from inherent trade-offs between generation quality and diversity. To address this, we propose the first semantic image synthesis framework built upon denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). Our method fundamentally decouples two key inputs: noisy images are fed into the U-Net encoder, while semantic layouts guide a dedicated decoder path via multi-level Spatially-Adaptive Denormalization (SPADE). Crucially, we introduce classifier-free guidance—the first such application in semantic diffusion synthesis—to substantially improve layout-to-pixel alignment. Evaluated on four standard benchmarks—Cityscapes, ADE20K, COCO-Stuff, and Mapillary Vistas—our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance: FID of 14.3 and LPIPS of 0.52, demonstrating significant gains in both visual fidelity and semantic consistency.