Generative AI for Vision: A Comprehensive Study of Frameworks and Applications

Abstract: Generative AI is transforming image synthesis, enabling the creation of high-quality, diverse, and photorealistic visuals across industries like design, media, healthcare, and autonomous systems. Advances in techniques such as image-to-image translation, text-to-image generation, domain transfer, and multimodal alignment have broadened the scope of automated visual content creation, supporting a wide spectrum of applications. These advancements are driven by models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), conditional frameworks, and diffusion-based approaches such as Stable Diffusion. This work presents a structured classification of image generation techniques based on the nature of the input, organizing methods by input modalities like noisy vectors, latent representations, and conditional inputs. We explore the principles behind these models, highlight key frameworks including DALL-E, ControlNet, and DeepSeek Janus-Pro, and address challenges such as computational costs, data biases, and output alignment with user intent. By offering this input-centric perspective, this study bridges technical depth with practical insights, providing researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive resource to harness generative AI for real-world applications.