Incorporating Multiscale Contextual Loss for Image Style Transfer

In this paper, we propose to impose a multiscale contextual loss for image style transfer based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). In the traditional optimization framework, a new stylized image is synthesized by constraining the high-level CNN features similar to a content image and the lower-level CNN features similar to a style image, which, however, appears to lost many details of the content image, presenting unpleasing and inconsistent distortions or artifacts. The proposed multiscale contextual loss, named Haar loss, is responsible for preserving the lost details by dint of matching the features derived from the content image and the synthesized image via wavelet transform. It endows the synthesized image with the characteristic to better retain the semantic information of the content image. More specifically, the unpleasant distortions can be effectively alleviated while the style can be well preserved. In the experiments, we show the visually more consistent and simultaneously well-stylized images generated by incorporating the multiscale contextual loss.