Despite nearly a decade of literature on style transfer, there is no undisputed definition of artistic style. State-of-the-art models produce impressive results but are difficult to interpret since, without a coherent definition of style, the problem of style transfer is inherently ill-posed. Early work framed style-transfer as an optimization problem but treated style as a measure only of texture. This led to artifacts in the outputs of early models where content features from the style image sometimes bled into the output image. Conversely, more recent work with diffusion models offers compelling empirical results but provides little theoretical grounding. To address these issues, we propose an alternative definition of artistic style. We suggest that style should be thought of as a set of global symmetries that dictate the arrangement of local textures. We validate this perspective empirically by learning the symmetries of a large dataset of paintings and showing that symmetries are predictive of the artistic movement to which each painting belongs. Finally, we show that by considering both local and global features, using both Lie generators and traditional measures of texture, we can quantitatively capture the stylistic similarity between artists better than with either set of features alone. This approach not only aligns well with art historians' consensus but also offers a robust framework for distinguishing nuanced stylistic differences, allowing for a more interpretable, theoretically grounded approach to style transfer.
Recent advances in generative models and adversarial training have enabled artificially generating artworks in various artistic styles. It is highly desirable to gain more control over the generated style in practice. However, artistic styles are unlike object categories -- there are a continuous spectrum of styles distinguished by subtle differences. Few works have been explored to capture the continuous spectrum of styles and apply it to a style generation task. In this paper, we propose to achieve this by embedding original artwork examples into a continuous style space. The style vectors a…
This note presents an extension to the neural artistic style transfer algorithm (Gatys et al.). The original algorithm transforms an image to have the style of another given image. For example, a photograph can be transformed to have the style of a famous painting. Here we address a potential shortcoming of the original method: the algorithm transfers the colors of the original painting, which can alter the appearance of the scene in undesirable ways. We describe simple linear methods for transferring style while preserving colors.
DyArtbank: Diverse Artistic Style Transfer via Pre-trained Stable Diffusion and Dynamic Style Prompt Artbank
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
In this work we investigate different avenues of improving the Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style (by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker and Matthias Bethge, arXiv:1508.06576). While showing great results when transferring homogeneous and repetitive patterns, the original style representation often fails to capture more complex properties, like having separate styles of foreground and background. This leads to visual artifacts and undesirable textures appearing in unexpected regions when performing style transfer. We tackle this issue with a variety of approaches, mostly by modifying the style …
Artistic style transfer can be thought as a process to generate different versions of abstraction of the original image. However, most of the artistic style transfer operators are not optimized for human faces thus mainly suffers from two undesirable features when applying them to selfies. First, the edges of human faces may unpleasantly deviate from the ones in the original image. Second, the skin color is far from faithful to the original one which is usually problematic in producing quality selfies. In this paper, we take a different approach and formulate this abstraction process as a grad…
Arbitrary Style Transfer is a technique used to produce a new image from two images: a content image, and a style image. The newly produced image is unseen and is generated from the algorithm itself. Balancing the structure and style components has been the major challenge that other state-of-the-art algorithms have tried to solve. Despite all the efforts, it's still a major challenge to apply the artistic style that was originally created on top of the structure of the content image while maintaining consistency. In this work, we solved these problems by using a Deep Learning approach using C…
In the past, manually re-drawing an image in a certain artistic style required a professional artist and a long time. Doing this for a video sequence single-handed was beyond imagination. Nowadays computers provide new possibilities. We present an approach that transfers the style from one image (for example, a painting) to a whole video sequence. We make use of recent advances in style transfer in still images and propose new initializations and loss functions applicable to videos. This allows us to generate consistent and stable stylized video sequences, even in cases with large motion and s…
Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究中心）
Artistic text style transfer is the task of migrating the style from a source image to the target text to create artistic typography. Recent style transfer methods have considered texture control to enhance usability. However, controlling the stylistic degree in terms of shape deformation remains an important open challenge. In this paper, we present the first text style transfer network that allows for real-time control of the crucial stylistic degree of the glyph through an adjustable parameter. Our key contribution is a novel bidirectional shape matching framework to establish an effective …
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Automatic artistic text generation is an emerging topic which receives increasing attention due to its wide applications. The artistic text can be divided into three components, content, font, and texture, respectively. Existing artistic text generation models usually focus on manipulating one aspect of the above components, which is a sub-optimal solution for controllable general artistic text generation. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel approach, namely GenText, to achieve general artistic text style transfer by separably migrating the font and texture styles from the different sourc…
We explore the method of style transfer presented in the article "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker and Matthias Bethge (arXiv:1508.06576). We first demonstrate the power of the suggested style space on a few examples. We then vary different hyper-parameters and program properties that were not discussed in the original paper, among which are the recognition network used, starting point of the gradient descent and different ways to partition style and content layers. We also give a brief comparison of some of the existing algorithm implementations and d…
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；MILA, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学MILA）
In this paper, we present a method which combines the flexibility of the neural algorithm of artistic style with the speed of fast style transfer networks to allow real-time stylization using any content/style image pair. We build upon recent work leveraging conditional instance normalization for multi-style transfer networks by learning to predict the conditional instance normalization parameters directly from a style image. The model is successfully trained on a corpus of roughly 80,000 paintings and is able to generalize to paintings previously unobserved. We demonstrate that the learned em…
Computing the gradient of an image is a common step in computer vision pipelines. The image gradient quantifies the magnitude and direction of edges in an image and is used in creating features for downstream machine learning tasks. Typically, the image gradient is represented as a grayscale image. This paper introduces directional pseudo-coloring, an approach to color the image gradient in a deliberate and coherent manner. By pseudo-coloring the image gradient magnitude with the image gradient direction, we can enhance the visual quality of image edges and achieve an artistic transformation o…
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）
Drawing a beautiful painting is a dream of many people since childhood. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, Line Artist, to synthesize artistic style paintings with freehand sketch images, leveraging the power of deep learning and advanced algorithms. Our scheme includes three models. The Sketch Image Extraction (SIE) model is applied to generate the training data. It includes smoothing reality images and pencil sketch extraction. The Detailed Image Synthesis (DIS) model trains a conditional generative adversarial network to generate detailed real-world information. The Adaptively Weight…
The rapid advancement of deep learning has significantly boomed the development of photorealistic style transfer. In this review, we reviewed the development of photorealistic style transfer starting from artistic style transfer and the contribution of traditional image processing techniques on photorealistic style transfer, including some work that had been completed in the Multimedia lab at the University of Alberta. Many techniques were discussed in this review. However, our focus is on VGG-based techniques, whitening and coloring transform (WCTs) based techniques, the combination of deep l…
Manually re-drawing an image in a certain artistic style takes a professional artist a long time. Doing this for a video sequence single-handedly is beyond imagination. We present two computational approaches that transfer the style from one image (for example, a painting) to a whole video sequence. In our first approach, we adapt to videos the original image style transfer technique by Gatys et al. based on energy minimization. We introduce new ways of initialization and new loss functions to generate consistent and stable stylized video sequences even in cases with large motion and strong oc…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
Transferring artistic styles onto everyday photographs has become an extremely popular task in both academia and industry. Recently, offline training has replaced on-line iterative optimization, enabling nearly real-time stylization. When those stylization networks are applied directly to high-resolution images, however, the style of localized regions often appears less similar to the desired artistic style. This is because the transfer process fails to capture small, intricate textures and maintain correct texture scales of the artworks. Here we propose a multimodal convolutional neural netwo…
OPPO US Research Center, InnoPeak Technology Inc（InnoPeak科技公司OPPO美国研究中心）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
The paper proposes a Dynamic ResBlock Generative Adversarial Network (DRB-GAN) for artistic style transfer. The style code is modeled as the shared parameters for Dynamic ResBlocks connecting both the style encoding network and the style transfer network. In the style encoding network, a style class-aware attention mechanism is used to attend the style feature representation for generating the style codes. In the style transfer network, multiple Dynamic ResBlocks are designed to integrate the style code and the extracted CNN semantic feature and then feed into the spatial window Layer-Instance…
Artistic Neural Style Transfer Algorithms with Activation Smoothing
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）
Recent powerful vision classifiers are biased towards textures, while shape information is overlooked by the models. A simple attempt by augmenting training images using the artistic style transfer method, called Stylized ImageNet, can reduce the texture bias. However, Stylized ImageNet approach has two drawbacks in fidelity and diversity. First, the generated images show low image quality due to the significant semantic gap betweeen natural images and artistic paintings. Also, Stylized ImageNet training samples are pre-computed before training, resulting in showing the lack of diversity for e…
Neural style transfer has been demonstrated to be powerful in creating artistic image with help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, there is still lack of computational analysis of perceptual components of the artistic style. Different from some early attempts which studied the style by some pre-processing or post-processing techniques, we investigate the characteristics of the style systematically based on feature map produced by CNN. First, we computationally decompose the style into basic elements using not only spectrum based methods including Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Dis…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made a dramatic leap in high-fidelity image synthesis and stylized face generation. Recently, a layer-swapping mechanism has been developed to improve the stylization performance. However, this method is incapable of fitting arbitrary styles in a single model and requires hundreds of style-consistent training images for each style. To address the above issues, we propose BlendGAN for arbitrary stylized face generation by leveraging a flexible blending strategy and a generic artistic dataset. Specifically, we first train a self-supervised style encode…
StyMam: A Mamba-Based Generator for Artistic Style Transfer
School of Information Engineering, Suqian University（信息工程学院，苏庆大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（人工智能与计算机科学学院，江南大学）；Jiangsu Province Engineering Research Center of Smart Poultry Farming and Intelligent Equipment（江苏省智能养鸡场与智能设备工程研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（计算机科学学院，南京邮电大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（自动化研究所，中国科学院）；School of Internet of Things, Wuxi University of Technology（物联网学院，无锡科技大学）
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技校区）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
We propose a fast feed-forward network for arbitrary style transfer, which can generate stylized image for previously unseen content and style image pairs. Besides the traditional content and style representation based on deep features and statistics for textures, we use adversarial networks to regularize the generation of stylized images. Our adversarial network learns the intrinsic property of image styles from large-scale multi-domain artistic images. The adversarial training is challenging because both the input and output of our generator are diverse multi-domain images. We use a conditio…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
We present HyperNST; a neural style transfer (NST) technique for the artistic stylization of images, based on Hyper-networks and the StyleGAN2 architecture. Our contribution is a novel method for inducing style transfer parameterized by a metric space, pre-trained for style-based visual search (SBVS). We show for the first time that such space may be used to drive NST, enabling the application and interpolation of styles from an SBVS system. The technical contribution is a hyper-network that predicts weight updates to a StyleGAN2 pre-trained over a diverse gamut of artistic content (portraits)…
Through Van Gogh's Eyes: Global Style Transfer with Diffusion Model
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术研究院）；University of Science and Technology（科技大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；Gachon University（嘉泉大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
A neural artistic style transformation (NST) model can modify the appearance of a simple image by adding the style of a famous image. Even though the transformed images do not look precisely like artworks by the same artist of the respective style images, the generated images are appealing. Generally, a trained NST model specialises in a style, and a single image represents that style. However, generating an image under a new style is a tedious process, which includes full model training. In this paper, we present two methods that step toward the style image independent neural style transfer m…
Peking University（北京大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Universal style transfer is an image editing task that renders an input content image using the visual style of arbitrary reference images, including both artistic and photorealistic stylization. Given a pair of images as the source of content and the reference of style, existing solutions usually first train an auto-encoder (AE) to reconstruct the image using deep features and then embeds pre-defined style transfer modules into the AE reconstruction procedure to transfer the style of the reconstructed image through modifying the deep features. While existing methods typically need multiple ro…
PhotoDoodle: Learning Artistic Image Editing from Few-Shot Pairwise Data
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tiamat（提亚马特）
Gender Artifacts from Art History to Text-to-Image Generation
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Hasso Plattner Institut University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学霍索普纳研究所）；The University of Osaka（大阪大学）
Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich（慕尼黑路德维希-马克西米利安大学）
Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Of particular note is the field of ``AI-Art'', which has seen unprecedented growth with the emergence of powerful multimodal models such as CLIP. By combining speech and image synthesis models, so-called ``prompt-engineering'' has become established, in which carefully selected and composed sentences are used to achieve a certain visual style in the synthesized image. In this note, we present an alternative approach based on retrieval-augmented diffusion models (RDMs). In…
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）
Artistic style transfer aims at migrating the style from an example image to a content image. Currently, optimization-based methods have achieved great stylization quality, but expensive time cost restricts their practical applications. Meanwhile, feed-forward methods still fail to synthesize complex style, especially when holistic global and local patterns exist. Inspired by the common painting process of drawing a draft and revising the details, we introduce a novel feed-forward method named Laplacian Pyramid Network (LapStyle). LapStyle first transfers global style patterns in low-resolutio…
UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；UC Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Despite having promising results, style transfer, which requires preparing style images in advance, may result in lack of creativity and accessibility. Following human instruction, on the other hand, is the most natural way to perform artistic style transfer that can significantly improve controllability for visual effect applications. We introduce a new task, language-driven artistic style transfer (LDAST), to manipulate the style of a content image, guided by a text. We propose contrastive language visual artist (CLVA) that learns to extract visual semantics from style instructions and accom…
