There is something that escapes me regarding this very cool neural style transfer technique. One would expect it to need at least three starting images: the one to transform, the one used as a source for the style, and a non-styled version of the source. This last one should give the network hints on how to transform the unstyled version in the styled one. For example, what does a straight line end up being in the st…
It's right that it needs additional information to distinguish style from content, but they get that from selected layers from established, pre-trained neural nets for image recognition. I don't entirely understand why it works myself, but it seems to.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
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Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's right that it needs additional information to distinguish style from content, but they get that from selected layers from established, pre-trained neural nets for image recognition. I don't entirely understand why it works myself, but it seems to.
From the way you described it, you could consider the pre-trained network to be the "missing image". It already has an idea of what images should look like so when it detects an object the "style" is what makes that object different than the stereotypical one it's already modeled.
I think Alex J. Champandard's implementation is probably the best one out there right now. It has a ton of knobs to twist and is very fast.
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#53It uses an algorithmic 'paint synthesizer' to generate brushes (with hundreds of presets) and auto-paint canvases, and is designed for animation (rotoscoping) as well as static artwork. The output can be reminiscent of the style of the movie 'A Scanner Darkly', but the software is hugely flexible. Here are a couple of rather amazing examples: http://studioartist.ning.com/video/auto-rotoscoped-dancers and http://studioartist.ning.com/video/dance-styles-animation-re...
Also, unlike most other 'painterly' software, the graphics are resolution independent - meaning that they can be scaled up to any size without loss of detail.
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another interesting problem would be the generation of filler pictures (I don't know the correct term). Normally there is a person who draws keyframes at a much lower framerate. Other animators then fill in the frames between to increase the framerate.
They're called inbetweens or tweens. According to recent HN article, they are outsourced to South Korea. Generating them with algorithm would be interesting, but often incorrect and against artist wishes. For example, objects in motion sometimes needs to be blurred; some characters need to have ghost duplicates; shapes get distorted and exaggerated. I think at this moment it is not possible to instruct algorithm to t…
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#55This is cool, but the frame-to-frame variance is distracting. I really want to see this reimplemented with temporal constraints a-la this paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khuj4ASldmU
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#56Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#57There is something that escapes me regarding this very cool neural style transfer technique. One would expect it to need at least three starting images: the one to transform, the one used as a source for the style, and a non-styled version of the source. This last one should give the network hints on how to transform the unstyled version in the styled one. For example, what does a straight line end up being in the st…
Aside from the 'missing image' part, what is the fitness example here for training? How does the training process determine what a good image is given there aren't many (any?) examples of a source image -> picasso mapping?
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#58I have two opinions: 1) I don't think cubism transfers well into a motion picture format, 2) I think these experiments, as they are currently, attempt to merge two styles and end up with neither, and nothing novel in its place; there is little Kubrick or Picasso in the final piece. I think it's superficial and doesn't do either source justice.
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#59There is something that escapes me regarding this very cool neural style transfer technique. One would expect it to need at least three starting images: the one to transform, the one used as a source for the style, and a non-styled version of the source. This last one should give the network hints on how to transform the unstyled version in the styled one. For example, what does a straight line end up being in the st…
I believe that this is done using Restricted Boltzman Machines[1] trained with the stylised image.
Think of it as a network that receives an image on the input layer, sends it to one or more hidden layers with less nodes (like an auto-encoder), and then tries to reconstruct the image on the output nodes. This is like a lossy compressor-decompressor overfitted to the stylized image.
Now, just pass the real image as an input to your network and the output should be a stylized version of the input.
Re: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ rendered in the style of Picasso
#60Serious question: how is this different than one of the many photoshop filters that could be applied iteratively to each frame?
There likely isn't a Picasso Photoshop filter that can match the fidelity of the style transfer used in the video. (I checked; the best you can get is a macro to automate faux-cubism)