Adjustable Real-time Style Transfer
This addresses the problem for users of style transfer models who need more flexibility without retraining, though it is incremental as it builds on existing feed-forward networks.
The paper tackles the lack of user control in real-time artistic style transfer by proposing a method that allows adjustment of hyper-parameters after training, enabling users to modify stylized outputs from the same style/content pair, with experiments showing it is comparable to retraining models.
Artistic style transfer is the problem of synthesizing an image with content similar to a given image and style similar to another. Although recent feed-forward neural networks can generate stylized images in real-time, these models produce a single stylization given a pair of style/content images, and the user doesn't have control over the synthesized output. Moreover, the style transfer depends on the hyper-parameters of the model with varying "optimum" for different input images. Therefore, if the stylized output is not appealing to the user, she/he has to try multiple models or retrain one with different hyper-parameters to get a favorite stylization. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a novel method which allows adjustment of crucial hyper-parameters, after the training and in real-time, through a set of manually adjustable parameters. These parameters enable the user to modify the synthesized outputs from the same pair of style/content images, in search of a favorite stylized image. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments indicate how adjusting these parameters is comparable to retraining the model with different hyper-parameters. We also demonstrate how these parameters can be randomized to generate results which are diverse but still very similar in style and content.