Neural arbitrary style transfer for portrait images using the attention mechanism
This addresses a specific issue in image processing for portrait stylization, making it incremental as it builds on existing arbitrary style transfer methods.
The paper tackles the problem of excessive distortion or weak style expression in portrait images during arbitrary style transfer by proposing a combined deep neural network architecture with an attention mechanism that adapts style transfer based on image segments, achieving improved results for portraits.
Arbitrary style transfer is the task of synthesis of an image that has never been seen before, using two given images: content image and style image. The content image forms the structure, the basic geometric lines and shapes of the resulting image, while the style image sets the color and texture of the result. The word "arbitrary" in this context means the absence of any one pre-learned style. So, for example, convolutional neural networks capable of transferring a new style only after training or retraining on a new amount of data are not con-sidered to solve such a problem, while networks based on the attention mech-anism that are capable of performing such a transformation without retraining - yes. An original image can be, for example, a photograph, and a style image can be a painting of a famous artist. The resulting image in this case will be the scene depicted in the original photograph, made in the stylie of this picture. Recent arbitrary style transfer algorithms make it possible to achieve good re-sults in this task, however, in processing portrait images of people, the result of such algorithms is either unacceptable due to excessive distortion of facial features, or weakly expressed, not bearing the characteristic features of a style image. In this paper, we consider an approach to solving this problem using the combined architecture of deep neural networks with a attention mechanism that transfers style based on the contents of a particular image segment: with a clear predominance of style over the form for the background part of the im-age, and with the prevalence of content over the form in the image part con-taining directly the image of a person.