No Arabic abstract
Existing methods for AI-generated artworks still struggle with generating high-quality stylized content, where high-level semantics are preserved, or separating fine-grained styles from various artists. We propose a novel Generative Adversarial Disentanglement Network which can disentangle two complementary factors of variations when only one of them is labelled in general, and fully decompose complex anime illustrations into style and content in particular. Training such model is challenging, since given a style, various content data may exist but not the other way round. Our approach is divided into two stages, one that encodes an input image into a style independent content, and one based on a dual-conditional generator. We demonstrate the ability to generate high-fidelity anime portraits with a fixed content and a large variety of styles from over a thousand artists, and vice versa, using a single end-to-end network and with applications in style transfer. We show this unique capability as well as superior output to the current state-of-the-art.
Deep learning-based style transfer between images has recently become a popular area of research. A common way of encoding style is through a feature representation based on the Gram matrix of features extracted by some pre-trained neural network or some other form of feature statistics. Such a definition is based on an arbitrary human decision and may not best capture what a style really is. In trying to gain a better understanding of style, we propose a metric learning-based method to explicitly encode the style of an artwork. In particular, our definition of style captures the differences between artists, as shown by classification performances, and such that the style representation can be interpreted, manipulated and visualized through style-conditioned image generation through a Generative Adversarial Network. We employ this method to explore the style space of anime portrait illustrations.
In this paper, we propose a novel framework to translate a portrait photo-face into an anime appearance. Our aim is to synthesize anime-faces which are style-consistent with a given reference anime-face. However, unlike typical translation tasks, such anime-face translation is challenging due to complex variations of appearances among anime-faces. Existing methods often fail to transfer the styles of reference anime-faces, or introduce noticeable artifacts/distortions in the local shapes of their generated faces. We propose AniGAN, a novel GAN-based translator that synthesizes high-quality anime-faces. Specifically, a new generator architecture is proposed to simultaneously transfer color/texture styles and transform local facial shapes into anime-like counterparts based on the style of a reference anime-face, while preserving the global structure of the source photo-face. We propose a double-branch discriminator to learn both domain-specific distributions and domain-shared distributions, helping generate visually pleasing anime-faces and effectively mitigate artifacts. Extensive experiments on selfie2anime and a new face2anime dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The new dataset is available at https://github.com/bing-li-ai/AniGAN .
This paper aims to disentangle the latent space in cVAE into the spatial structure and the style code, which are complementary to each other, with one of them $z_s$ being label relevant and the other $z_u$ irrelevant. The generator is built by a connected encoder-decoder and a label condition mapping network. Depending on whether the label is related with the spatial structure, the output $z_s$ from the condition mapping network is used either as a style code or a spatial structure code. The encoder provides the label irrelevant posterior from which $z_u$ is sampled. The decoder employs $z_s$ and $z_u$ in each layer by adaptive normalization like SPADE or AdaIN. Extensive experiments on two datasets with different types of labels show the effectiveness of our method.
Style transfer is to render given image contents in given styles, and it has an important role in both computer vision fundamental research and industrial applications. Following the success of deep learning based approaches, this problem has been re-launched recently, but still remains a difficult task because of trade-off between preserving contents and faithful rendering of styles. Indeed, how well-balanced content and style are is crucial in evaluating the quality of stylized images. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end two-stream Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) aiming at balancing the contributions of the content and the style in rendered images. Our proposed network consists of the encoder and decoder parts. The encoder part utilizes a FCN for content and a FCN for style where the two FCNs have feature injections and are independently trained to preserve the semantic content and to learn the faithful style representation in each. The semantic content feature and the style representation feature are then concatenated adaptively and fed into the decoder to generate style-transferred (stylized) images. In order to train our proposed network, we employ a loss network, the pre-trained VGG-16, to compute content loss and style loss, both of which are efficiently used for the feature injection as well as the feature concatenation. Our intensive experiments show that our proposed model generates more balanced stylized images in content and style than state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our proposed network achieves efficiency in speed.
This paper presents a content-aware style transfer algorithm for paintings and photos of similar content using pre-trained neural network, obtaining better results than the previous work. In addition, the numerical experiments show that the style pattern and the content information is not completely separated by neural network.