Fast neural style transfer
A short writeup and example images are up on my blog.
In an attempt to learn Tensorflow I've implemented an Image Transformation Network as described in Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution by Johnson et al.
This technique uses loss functions based on a perceptual similarity and style similarity as described by Gatys et al to train a transformation network to synthesize the style of one image with the content of arbitrary images. After it's trained for a particular style it can be used to generate stylized images in one forward pass through the transformer network as opposed to 500-2000 forward + backward passes through a pretrained image classification net which is the direct approach.
Usage
First get the dependecies (COCO training set images and VGG model weights):
./get_files.sh
To generate an image directly from style and content, typically to explore styles and parameters:
python3 neural_style.py --CONTENT_IMAGE content.png --STYLE_IMAGES style.png
Also see other settings and hyperparameters in neural_style.py
To train a model for fast stylizing:
python3 fast-neural-style.py --TRAIN_IMAGES_PATH coco_img_path --STYLE_IMAGES style.png --BATCH_SIZE 4
Where --TRAIN_IMAGES_PATH
points to a directory of JPEGs to train the model. The paper uses the COCO image dataset (13GB). With my 2GB GTX960 card I can do a batch_size of 3 images. The paper trains the model for 2 epochs (160.000/BATCH_SIZE iteration).
To generate images fast with an already trained model:
python3 fast-neural-style.py --CONTENT_IMAGES path_to_images_to_transform
Requirements
- Python3.x
- Tensorflow
- VGG-19 model
- COCO dataset
Acknowledgement
- [Chainer implementation] (https://github.com/yusuketomoto/chainer-fast-neuralstyle)
- [Tensorflow Neural style implementation] (https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-style)