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Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks (arxiv.org)
66 points by fitzwatermellow on Apr 18, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | 8 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of tweaking an image slowly at generation time, this trains a network first to copy the look of patches, turning noise or a photo into a texture of any size. It matches earlier neural texture methods while running at least 500 times faster.

Abstract · Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks

This paper proposes Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks (MGANs), a method for training generative neural networks for efficient texture synthesis. While deep neural network approaches have recently demonstrated remarkable results in terms of synthesis quality, they still come at considerable computational costs (minutes of run-time for low-res images). Our paper addresses this efficiency issue. Instead of a numerical deconvolution in previous work, we precompute a feed-forward, strided convolutional network that captures the feature statistics of Markovian patches and is able to directly generate outputs of arbitrary dimensions. Such network can directly decode brown noise to realistic texture, or photos to artistic paintings. With adversarial training, we obtain quality comparable to recent neural texture synthesis methods. As no optimization is required any longer at generation time, our run-time performance (0.25M pixel images at 25Hz) surpasses previous neural texture synthesizers by a significant margin (at least 500 times faster). We apply this idea to texture synthesis, style transfer, and video stylization.

Chuan Li, Michael Wand
arXiv:1604.04382 · cs.CV · submitted Apr 15, 2016
abstract · pdf · html · 17 pages, 15 figures

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Correct code link:

https://github.com/chuanli11/MGANs

Collection of other implementations of this feedforward neural style transfer approach:

https://tensortalk.com/?cat=feedforward-neural-style-transfe...

Or, regular neural style transfer:

https://tensortalk.com/?cat=neural-style-transfer

They also have a video with some samples and an overview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRD8LpPvdHI

Since it seems this paper's primary focus is on performance, it'd be interesting to see how this technique stacks up against one of those fancy new binary networks (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05279)
What is texture synthesis usually used for?
Games. Good texture synthesis can augment or replace the texture creation process in games which often rely on hand-painting and manual seam-removal in Photoshop[0][1].

[0] https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter [1] http://quixel.se/

Publishing papers.