Pix2Pix is a conditional GAN that excels in paired image-to-image translation, training on aligned pairs of input and output images.
Pix2Pix uses a U-Net generator and a PatchGAN discriminator, with the L1 loss ensuring pixel-perfect matches between the generated and target images.
On the other hand, CycleGAN is an unpaired image-to-image translation method that can transform images from one domain to another without requiring matched pairs.
CycleGAN's key innovation is the cycle consistency loss, which ensures that translating an image back and forth between domains yields a close approximation of the original image.