Depth-aware neural style transfer

Stylized image denoising via noise style transfer and Quasi Siamese network

Style transfer is an optimization technique used to create a new image out of a content image and a style image (as in an artistic work by a well-known painter) as a result of blending, the content image is altered to be painted in the same style as the content image but to resemble it of the style image. The essential method for creating style transfer is the convolutional neural network that allows for transfer (CNN). This paper will analyse key methods for performing style transfer photos and quickly compare multiple models and their outcomes. We primarily contrast one pioneering technique, developed by Leon Gatys in 2015, with the most recent technology in the High-Resolution Network from 2019 for the transfer of photorealistic style. Gatys's Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style produces excellent results, but the resulting data doesn't maintain the content image's characteristics and the fact that the paper gives no concise description of the internal mechanisms gram matrix. The enhancement is the conversion to a photorealistic style transfer from Gatys' neural style transfer. It aids in maintaining the structure and defining characteristics within the content image. Both methods make use of VGG, a network that was trained using the ImageNet dataset for conducting image categorization. We made our own data set with five types or groups and used transfer learning in a VGG network to do a style transfer using transfer learning.

Art in general and fine arts, in particular, play a significant role in human life, entertaining and dispelling stress and motivating their creativeness in specific ways. Many well-known artists have left a rich treasure of paintings for humanity, preserving their exquisite talent and creativity through unique artistic styles. In recent years, a technique called ’style transfer’ allows computers to apply famous artistic styles into the style of a picture or photograph while retaining the shape of the image, creating superior visual experiences. The basic model of that process, named ’Neural Style Transfer,’ has been introduced promisingly by Leon A. Gatys; however, it contains several limitations on output quality and implementation time, making it challenging to apply in practice. Based on that basic model, an image transform network was proposed in this paper to generate higher-quality artwork and higher abilities to perform on a larger image amount. The proposed model significantly shortened the execution time and can be implemented in a real-time application, providing promising results and performance. The outcomes are auspicious and can be used as a referenced model in color grading or semantic image segmentation, and future research focuses on improving its applications.

The success of training deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) heavily depends on a significant amount of labelled data. Recent research has found that neural style transfer algorithms can apply the artistic style of one image to another image without changing the latter's high-level semantic content, which makes it feasible to employ neural style transfer as a data augmentation method to add more variation to the training dataset. The contribution of this paper is a thorough evaluation of the effectiveness of the neural style transfer as a data augmentation method for image classification tasks. We explore the state-of-the-art neural style transfer algorithms and apply them as a data augmentation method on Caltech 101 and Caltech 256 dataset, where we found around 2% improvement from 83% to 85% of the image classification accuracy with VGG16, compared with traditional data augmentation strategies. We also combine this new method with conventional data augmentation approaches to further improve the performance of image classification. This work shows the potential of neural style transfer in computer vision field, such as helping us to reduce the difficulty of collecting sufficient labelled data and improve the performance of generic image-based deep learning algorithms.

Self-supervised learning for RGB-D object tracking

BackgroundDetection of ossification areas of hand bones in X-ray images is an important task, e.g. as a preprocessing step in automated bone age estimation. Deep neural networks have emerged recently as de facto standard detection methods, but their drawback is the need of large annotated datasets. Finetuning pre-trained networks is a viable alternative, but it is not clear a priori if training with small annotated datasets will be successful, as it depends on the problem at hand. In this paper, we show that pre-trained networks can be utilized to produce an effective detector of ossification areas in pediatric X-ray images of hands.Methods and findingsA publicly available Faster R-CNN network, pre-trained on the COCO dataset, was utilized and finetuned with 240 manually annotated radiographs from the RSNA Pediatric Bone Age Challenge, which comprises over 14.000 pediatric radiographs. The validation is done on another 89 radiographs from the dataset and the performance is measured by Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To understand the effect of the data size on the pre-trained network, subsampling was applied to the training data and the training was repeated. Additionally, the network was trained from scratch without any pre-trained weights. Finally, to understand whether the trained model could be useful, we compared the inference of the network to an annotation of an expert radiologist. The finetuned network was able to achieve an average precision (mAP@0.5IoU) of 92.92 ± 1.93. Apart from the wrist region, all ossification areas were able to benefit from more data. In contrast, the network trained from scratch was not able to produce any correct results. When compared to the annotations of the expert radiologist, the network was able to localize the regions quite well, as the F1-Score was on average 91.85 ± 1.06.ConclusionsBy finetuning a pre-trained deep neural network, with 240 annotated radiographs, we were able to successfully detect ossification areas in prediatric hand radiographs.

Advances in satellite imagery presents unprecedented opportunities for understanding natural and social phenomena at global and regional scales. Although the field of satellite remote sensing has evaluated imperative questions to human and environmental sustainability, scaling those techniques to very high spatial resolutions at regional scales remains a challenge. Satellite imagery is now more accessible with greater spatial, spectral and temporal resolution creating a data bottleneck in identifying the content of images. Because satellite images are unlabeled, unsupervised methods allow us to organize images into coherent groups or clusters. However, the performance of unsupervised methods, like all other machine learning methods, depends on features. Recent studies using features from pre-trained networks have shown promise for learning in new datasets. This suggests that features from pre-trained networks can be used for learning in temporally and spatially dynamic data sources such as satellite imagery. It is not clear, however, which features from which layer and network architecture should be used for learning new tasks. In this paper, we present an approach to evaluate the transferability of features from pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for satellite imagery. We explore and evaluate different features and feature combinations extracted from various deep network architectures, and systematically evaluate over 2,000 network-layer combinations. In addition, we test the transferability of our engineered features and learned features from an unlabeled dataset to a different labeled dataset. Our feature engineering and learning are done on the unlabeled Draper Satellite Chronology dataset, and we test on the labeled UC Merced Land dataset to achieve near state-of-the-art classification results. These results suggest that even without any or minimal training, these networks can generalize well to other datasets. This method could be useful in the task of clustering unlabeled images and other unsupervised machine learning tasks.

Artistic style transfer is one the enormous research fields in computer vision. It is a technique to synthesize a content image and the style together to form an stylized image. Various popular applications like Prisma, Deepart, Pikazoapp provide a platform to synthesis images in order to produce very exciting artistic style. These applications use Convolutional Neural Networks to transform the images in an artistic style. Prisma photo editor has more than 250 modern art filters and 110 million users. Hence, the amount of images being synthesized is huge and computation requires to perform the task efficiently is large. Abundant CNN architectures like VGG16, VGG19, GoogleNet etc are introduced to solve this problem of heavy computations. The system helps users to transform their images into artworks using style of famous artists for stirring image filters, and it might be useful for artists to have an indication about the art. This paper presents the fundamental concepts, classification of Style Transfer and major progress towards Neural Style Transfer.

Making decorated logos requires image editing skills, without sufficient skills, it could be a time-consuming task. While there are many on-line web services to make new logos, they have limited designs and duplicates can be made. We propose using neural style transfer with clip art and text for the creation of new and genuine logos. We introduce a new loss function based on distance transform of the input image, which allows the preservation of the silhouettes of text and objects. The proposed method contains style transfer to only a designated area. We demonstrate the characteristics of proposed method. Finally, we show the results of logo generation with various input images.

The development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) has catalysed the emergence of the Neural Style Transfer (NST) field. NST elucidates the computer's comprehension of artistic elements, holding paramount significance in both academic and practical domains. In this paper, we introduce a novel system termed "Content-Adaptive Style Transfer." This system incorporates two additional techniques: object segmentation and image fusion, augmenting the customizability of NST. Our experimental results underscore its capability to execute style transfer exclusively on the foreground, leaving the background unaffected, or to modify the background style while preserving the original foreground. These innovations promise more rational outcomes in specific scenarios.

As light field images continue to increase in use and application, it becomes necessary to adapt existing image processing methods to this unique form of photography. In this paper we explore methods for applying neural style transfer to light field images. Feed-forward style transfer networks provide fast, high-quality results for monocular images, but no such networks exist for full light field images. Because of the size of these images, current light field data sets are small and are insufficient for training purely feed-forward style-transfer networks from scratch. Thus, it is necessary to adapt existing monocular style transfer networks in a way that allows for the stylization of each view of the light field while maintaining visual consistencies between views. To do this, we first generate disparity maps for each view given a single depth image for the light field. Then in a fashion similar to neural stylization of stereo images, we use disparity maps to enforce a consistency loss between views and to warp feature maps during the feed forward stylization. Unlike previous work, however, light fields have too many views to train a purely feed-forward network that can stylize the entire light field with angular consistency. Instead, the proposed method uses an iterative optimization for each view of a single light field image that backpropagates the consistency loss through the network. Thus, the network architecture allows for the incorporation of pre-trained fast monocular stylization network while avoiding the need for a large light field training set.

The neural style transfer has achieved a significant improvement with deep learning methods. However, the existing methods are susceptible to lack the ability for handling the texture style transfer because of their less consideration of the textural structure from style images. To overcome this drawback, this letter presents a simple method to capture the textural structure by using an adaptive auto-correlation alignment loss function. Furthermore, we also introduce three metrics to quantitatively evaluate the performance. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the proposed methods. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and our method can synthesize the stylized images with rich texture style patterns.

In today's world, Neural Style Transfer (NST) has become a trendsetting term. NST combines two pictures, a content picture and a reference image in style (such as the work of a renowned painter) in a way that makes the output image look like an image of the material, but rendered with the form of a reference picture. However, there is no study using the artwork or painting of Bangladeshi painters. Bangladeshi painting has a long history of more than two thousand years and is still being practiced by Bangladeshi painters. This study generates NST stylized image on Bangladeshi paintings and analyzes the human point of view regarding the aesthetic preference of NST on Bangladeshi paintings. To assure our study's acceptance, we performed qualitative human evaluations on generated stylized images by 60 individual humans of different age and gender groups. We have explained how NST works for Bangladeshi paintings and assess NST algorithms, both qualitatively \& quantitatively. Our study acts as a pre-requisite for the impact of NST stylized image using Bangladeshi paintings on mobile UI/GUI and material translation from the human perspective. We hope that this study will encourage new collaborations to create more NST related studies and expand the use of Bangladeshi artworks.

Neural style transfer represented a paradigm shift in image artistic rendering and applications in digital entertainment. Generative adversarial networks are considered as a general solution for style transfer problems. Researchers have explored multiple learning algorithms to increase the learning ability of style transfer networks. However, such research has overlooked an important outside motivator: social preference. Classical style transfer networks are trained offline and worked as a stationary model to transfer photos into stylized images, without any interaction with the environment. Based on the ideas from online training, we propose a new coarse-to-fine training strategy for neural style transfer systems to adapt to social preference change. In coarse stage, a primary model is learned via normal training method. In fine stage, the model is updated with online learning approach and sequentially added new data. We show that our approach exhibits improved performance compared to stationary model from visual effect and reflection of social preference. We conclude that the coarse-to-fine training strategy can improve the output of the generative model in social media environment.

Artistic Style Transfer(AST) a fascinating aspect of Neural Style Transfer(NST) has redefined the creative manipulation of digital images by imbuing photographs with the aesthetic characteristics of famous paintings. However a persistent challenge in NST-color distortion—often compromises the color fidelity of the content image during the style transfer process. This paper introduces an innovative approach employing the VGG-19 neural network to extract style features while preserving the color harmony of the content image through luminance transfer. This method ensures that the original color palette remains unaltered achieving an authentic blend of style and content characteristics. In our experimentation, we applied the innovative artistic style transfer technique to a variety of content images, incorporating the aesthetic elements from renowned paintings. Notably, our method successfully preserved the color fidelity of the content images throughout the style transfer process. This approach contributes significantly to the field by offering a improved technique for NST that harmonizes artistic style with natural coloration serving a valuable asset for artists and technologists.