We propose StyleBank, which is composed of multiple convolution filter banks and each filter bank explicitly represents one style, for neural image style transfer. To transfer an image to a specific style, the corresponding filter bank is operated on top of the intermediate feature embedding produced by a single auto-encoder. The StyleBank and the auto-encoder are jointly learnt, where the learning is conducted in such a way that the auto-encoder does not encode any style information thanks to the flexibility introduced by the explicit filter bank representation. It also enables us to conduct incremental learning to add a new image style by learning a new filter bank while holding the auto-encoder fixed. The explicit style representation along with the flexible network design enables us to fuse styles at not only the image level, but also the region level. Our method is the first style transfer network that links back to traditional texton mapping methods, and hence provides new understanding on neural style transfer. Our method is easy to train, runs in real-time, and produces results that qualitatively better or at least comparable to existing methods.
To make the run-time more efficient, more and more works begin to directly learn a feed-forward generator network for a specific style. This way, stylized results can be obtained just with a forward pass, which is hundreds of times faster than iterative optimization @cite_33 . For example, @cite_10 propose a texture network for both texture synthesis and style transfer. @cite_23 define a perceptual loss function to help learn a transfer network that aims to produce results approaching @cite_33 . @cite_38 introduce a Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks, aiming to speed up their previous work @cite_8 .
@cite_38 @cite_33 @cite_8 @cite_23 @cite_10
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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. The recent work of , who characterized the style of an image by the statistics of convolutional neural network filters, ignited a renewed interest in the texture generation and image stylization problems. While their image generation technique uses a slow optimization process, recently several authors have proposed to learn generator neural networks that can produce similar outputs in one quick forward pass. While generator networks are promising, they are still inferior in visual quality and diversity compared to generation-by-optimization. In this work, we advance them in two significant ways. First, we introduce an instance normalization module to replace batch normalization with significant improvements to the quality of image stylization. Second, we improve diversity by introducing a new learning formulation that encourages generators to sample unbiasedly from the Julesz texture ensemble, which is the equivalence class of all images characterized by certain filter responses. Together, these two improvements take feed forward texture synthesis and image stylization much closer to the quality of generation-via-optimization, while retaining the speed advantage. We consider image transformation problems, where an input image is transformed into an output image. Recent methods for such problems typically train feed-forward convolutional neural networks using a loss between the output and ground-truth images. Parallel work has shown that high-quality images can be generated by defining and optimizing loss functions based on high-level features extracted from pretrained networks. We combine the benefits of both approaches, and propose the use of perceptual loss functions for training feed-forward networks for image transformation tasks. We show results on image style transfer, where a feed-forward network is trained to solve the optimization problem proposed by in real-time. Compared to the optimization-based method, our network gives similar qualitative results but is three orders of magnitude faster. We also experiment with single-image super-resolution, where replacing a per-pixel loss with a perceptual loss gives visually pleasing results. This paper proposes Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks (MGANs), a method for training generative networks for efficient texture synthesis. While deep neural network approaches have recently demonstrated remarkable results in terms of synthesis quality, they still come at considerable computational costs (minutes of run-time for low-res images). Our paper addresses this efficiency issue. Instead of a numerical deconvolution in previous work, we precompute a feed-forward, strided convolutional network that captures the feature statistics of Markovian patches and is able to directly generate outputs of arbitrary dimensions. Such network can directly decode brown noise to realistic texture, or photos to artistic paintings. With adversarial training, we obtain quality comparable to recent neural texture synthesis methods. As no optimization is required at generation time, our run-time performance (0.25 M pixel images at 25 Hz) surpasses previous neural texture synthesizers by a significant margin (at least 500 times faster). We apply this idea to texture synthesis, style transfer, and video stylization.