Exploring the Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style
This work provides incremental insights into style transfer for computer vision researchers, focusing on parameter tuning and extensions without major breakthroughs.
The paper explores the neural style transfer method by Gatys et al., investigating hyperparameters, network variations, and generating synthetic images to analyze the style space, and proposes two new style representations for potential local and content-aware transfer.
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 deep learning frameworks used. To study the style space further we attempt to generate synthetic images by maximizing a single entry in one of the Gram matrices $\mathcal{G}_l$ and some interesting results are observed. Next, we try to mimic the sparsity and intensity distribution of Gram matrices obtained from a real painting and generate more complex textures. Finally, we propose two new style representations built on top of network's features and discuss how one could be used to achieve local and potentially content-aware style transfer.