Interactive Artistic Multi-style Transfer

Abstract

Artistic style transfer is to render an image in the style of another image, which is a challenge problem in both image processing and arts. Deep neural networks are adopted to artistic style transfer and achieve remarkable success, such as AdaIN (adaptive instance normalization), WCT (whitening and coloring transforms), MST (multimodal style transfer), and SEMST (structure-emphasized multimodal style transfer). These algorithms modify the content image as a whole using only one style and one algorithm, which is easy to cause the foreground and background to be blurred together. In this paper, an iterative artistic multi-style transfer system is built to edit the image with multiple styles by flexible user interaction. First, a subjective evaluation experiment with art professionals is conducted to build an open evaluation framework for style transfer, including the universal evaluation questions and personalized answers for ten typical artistic styles. Then, we propose the interactive artistic multi-style transfer system, in which an interactive image crop tool is designed to cut a content image into several parts. For each part, users select a style image and an algorithm from AdaIN, WCT, MST, and SEMST by referring to the characteristics of styles and algorithms summarized by the evaluation experiments. To obtain richer results, the system provides a semantic-based parameter adjustment mode and the function of preserving colors of content image. Finally, case studies show the effectiveness and flexibility of the system.