A Method for Arbitrary Instance Style Transfer
This addresses a specific challenge in image style transfer for applications like stylistic painting and design prototyping, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing instance style transfer methods.
The paper tackles the problem of transferring arbitrary style to an instance in an arbitrary shape, which is underexplored compared to whole-image style transfer, and proposes a topologically inspired algorithm called Forward Stretching that transforms instances into tensor representations to enable direct style transfer, showcasing results in the paper.
The ability to synthesize style and content of different images to form a visually coherent image holds great promise in various applications such as stylistic painting, design prototyping, image editing, and augmented reality. However, the majority of works in image style transfer have focused on transferring the style of an image to the entirety of another image, and only a very small number of works have experimented on methods to transfer style to an instance of another image. Researchers have proposed methods to circumvent the difficulty of transferring style to an instance in an arbitrary shape. In this paper, we propose a topologically inspired algorithm called Forward Stretching to tackle this problem by transforming an instance into a tensor representation, which allows us to transfer style to this instance itself directly. Forward Stretching maps pixels to specific positions and interpolate values between pixels to transform an instance to a tensor. This algorithm allows us to introduce a method to transfer arbitrary style to an instance in an arbitrary shape. We showcase the results of our method in this paper.