Unbiased Image Style Transfer

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of style strength interpolation in neural style transfer and proposes an unbiased training method that improves control over style strength and stability of the output.

Contribution

It introduces an unbiased learning technique for style transfer networks, enabling better style control and more stable, accurate style interpolation.

Findings

Improved style control with unbiased training

Content image reconstruction at zero style strength

Enhanced stability of style transfer results

Abstract

Recent fast image style transferring methods use feed-forward neural networks to generate an output image of desired style strength from the input pair of a content and a target style image. In the existing methods, the image of intermediate style between the content and the target style is obtained by decoding a linearly interpolated feature in encoded feature space. However, there has been no work on analyzing the effectiveness of this kind of style strength interpolation so far. In this paper, we tackle the missing work on the in-depth analysis of style interpolation and propose a method that is more effective in controlling style strength. We interpret the training task of a style transfer network as a regression learning between the control parameter and output style strength. In this understanding, the existing methods are biased due to the fact that training is performed with one-sided data of full style strength (alpha = 1.0). Thus, this biased learning does not guarantee the generation of a desired intermediate style corresponding to the style control parameter between 0.0 and 1.0. To solve this problem of the biased network, we propose an unbiased learning technique which uses unbiased training data and corresponding unbiased loss for alpha = 0.0 to make the feed-forward networks to generate a zero-style image, i.e., content image when alpha = 0.0. Our experimental results verified that our unbiased learning method achieved the reconstruction of a content image with zero style strength, better regression specification between style control parameter and output style, and more stable style transfer that is insensitive to the weight of style loss without additive complexity in image generating process.