Enhanced Style Transfer in Real-Time with Histogram-Matched Instance Normalization

Since the neural networks are utilized to extract information from an image, Gatys et al. found that they could separate the content and style of images and reconstruct them to another image which called Style Transfer. Moreover, there are many feed-forward neural networks have been suggested to speeding up the original method to make Style Transfer become practical application. However, this takes a price: these feed-forward networks are unchangeable because of their fixed parameters which mean we cannot transfer arbitrary styles but only single one in real-time. Some coordinated approaches have been offered to relieve this dilemma. Such as a style-swap layer and an adaptive normalization layer (AdaIN) and soon. Its worth mentioning that we observed that the AdaIN layer only aligns the means and variance of the content feature maps with those of the style feature maps. Our method is aimed at presenting an operational approach that enables arbitrary style transfer in real-time, reserving more statistical information by histogram matching, providing more reliable texture clarity and more humane user control. We achieve performance more cheerful than existing approaches without adding calculation, complexity. And the speed comparable to the fastest Style Transfer method. Our method provides more flexible user control and trustworthy quality and stability.