Biblio

We, humans, have the ability to easily imagine scenes that depict sentences such as ``Today is a beautiful sunny day'' or ``There is a Christmas feel, in the air''. While it is hard to precisely describe what one person may imagine, the essential high-level themes associated with such sentences largely remains the same. The ability to synthesize novel images that depict the feel of a sentence is very useful in a variety of applications such as education, advertisement, and entertainment. While existing papers tackle this problem given a style image, we aim to provide a far more intuitive and easy to use solution that synthesizes novel renditions of an existing image, conditioned on a given sentence. We present a method for cross-modal style transfer between an English sentence and an image, to produce a new image that imbibes the essential theme of the sentence. We do this by modifying the style transfer mechanism used in image style transfer to incorporate a style component derived from the given sentence. We demonstrate promising results using the YFCC100m dataset.

Gatys et al. recently introduced a neural algorithm that renders a content image in the style of another image, achieving so-called style transfer. However, their framework requires a slow iterative optimization process, which limits its practical application. Fast approximations with feed-forward neural networks have been proposed to speed up neural style transfer. Unfortunately, the speed improvement comes at a cost: the network is usually tied to a fixed set of styles and cannot adapt to arbitrary new styles. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach that for the first time enables arbitrary style transfer in real-time. At the heart of our method is a novel adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) layer that aligns the mean and variance of the content features with those of the style features. Our method achieves speed comparable to the fastest existing approach, without the restriction to a pre-defined set of styles. In addition, our approach allows flexible user controls such as content-style trade-off, style interpolation, color & spatial controls, all using a single feed-forward neural network.

Transferring artistic styles onto everyday photographs has become an extremely popular task in both academia and industry. Recently, offline training has replaced online 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 network that takes into consideration faithful representations of both color and luminance channels, and performs stylization hierarchically with multiple losses of increasing scales. Compared to state-of-the-art networks, our network can also perform style transfer in nearly real-time by performing much more sophisticated training offline. By properly handling style and texture cues at multiple scales using several modalities, we can transfer not just large-scale, obvious style cues but also subtle, exquisite ones. That is, our scheme can generate results that are visually pleasing and more similar to multiple desired artistic styles with color and texture cues at multiple scales.

``Style transfer'' among images has recently emerged as a very active research topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system. Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential of the proposed approach.

Recent research endeavors have shown the potential of using feed-forward convolutional neural networks to accomplish fast style transfer for images. In this work, we take one step further to explore the possibility of exploiting a feed-forward network to perform style transfer for videos and simultaneously maintain temporal consistency among stylized video frames. Our feed-forward network is trained by enforcing the outputs of consecutive frames to be both well stylized and temporally consistent. More specifically, a hybrid loss is proposed to capitalize on the content information of input frames, the style information of a given style image, and the temporal information of consecutive frames. To calculate the temporal loss during the training stage, a novel two-frame synergic training mechanism is proposed. Compared with directly applying an existing image style transfer method to videos, our proposed method employs the trained network to yield temporally consistent stylized videos which are much more visually pleasant. In contrast to the prior video style transfer method which relies on time-consuming optimization on the fly, our method runs in real time while generating competitive visual results.

In this paper, inspired by Gatys's recent work, we propose a novel approach that transforms photos to comics using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). While Gatys's method that uses a pre-trained VGG network generally works well for transferring artistic styles such as painting from a style image to a content image, for more minimalist styles such as comics, the method often fails to produce satisfactory results. To address this, we further introduce a dedicated comic style CNN, which is trained for classifying comic images and photos. This new network is effective in capturing various comic styles and thus helps to produce better comic stylization results. Even with a grayscale style image, Gatys's method can still produce colored output, which is not desirable for comics. We develop a modified optimization framework such that a grayscale image is guaranteed to be synthesized. To avoid converging to poor local minima, we further initialize the output image using grayscale version of the content image. Various examples show that our method synthesizes better comic images than the state-of-the-art method.

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.

We propose a method for transferring an arbitrary style to only a specific object in an image. Style transfer is the process of combining the content of an image and the style of another image into a new image. Our results show that the proposed method can realize style transfer to specific object.