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Semantic Style Transfer and Turning Two-Bit Doodles into Fine Artwork (arxiv.org)
3 points by anishathalye on Mar 10, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: The system lets users paint simple color labels over a photo or doodle so each region, like sky or face, gets its own style instead of one look applied blindly across the image. This avoids common glitches and turns rough few-color sketches into paintings.

Abstract · Semantic Style Transfer and Turning Two-Bit Doodles into Fine Artworks

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven highly effective at image synthesis and style transfer. For most users, however, using them as tools can be a challenging task due to their unpredictable behavior that goes against common intuitions. This paper introduces a novel concept to augment such generative architectures with semantic annotations, either by manually authoring pixel labels or using existing solutions for semantic segmentation. The result is a content-aware generative algorithm that offers meaningful control over the outcome. Thus, we increase the quality of images generated by avoiding common glitches, make the results look significantly more plausible, and extend the functional range of these algorithms---whether for portraits or landscapes, etc. Applications include semantic style transfer and turning doodles with few colors into masterful paintings!

Alex J. Champandard
arXiv:1603.01768 · cs.CV · submitted Mar 5, 2016
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There's an implementation of the algorithm on GitHub: https://github.com/alexjc/neural-doodle