Could you give examples of using GAN in prod? Recently there was a discussion on Twitter about the reduced number of GAN papers in the last few years, and some people mentioned that they did not find adoption in industry.
As an aside. I do not personally feel the future of generative modeling is in generative art or creating new Pokémon or things like that, categories which broadly seem like neat tricks without real world usefulness or at least adoption.
Personally I'm also working on an industrial application, using a CycleGAN-based system to augment real world data (e.g. training a network to "paint" an object so we can apply traditional computer vision techniques such as a HSV filter to locate the object). It's quite promising for this kind of application, albeit hard to fine-tune.
I think your usecase is extremely promising assuming it results in better quality output than just running a modern object detector. Another usecase I don’t have bandwidth for, but would likely be very marketable, is similar to what you’re saying but to allow the use of traditional algos like sift or surf across modalities.