Coarse-to-Fine Structure-Aware Artistic Style Transfer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coarse-to-fine, structure-aware style transfer method that effectively fuses local style and content structures to produce high-quality artistic images, improving over existing global texture transfer approaches.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-level approach with a coarse network for global style transfer and a fine network with structural selective fusion modules for detailed structure preservation.

Findings

Produces high-quality, structure-aware stylized images

Outperforms state-of-the-art style transfer methods in visual quality

Effectively preserves local style and content structures

Abstract

Artistic style transfer aims to use a style image and a content image to synthesize a target image that retains the same artistic expression as the style image while preserving the basic content of the content image. Many recently proposed style transfer methods have a common problem; that is, they simply transfer the texture and color of the style image to the global structure of the content image. As a result, the content image has a local structure that is not similar to the local structure of the style image. In this paper, we present an effective method that can be used to transfer style patterns while fusing the local style structure into the local content structure. In our method, dif-ferent levels of coarse stylized features are first reconstructed at low resolution using a Coarse Network, in which style color distribution is roughly transferred, and the content structure is combined with the style structure. Then, the reconstructed features and the content features are adopted to synthesize high-quality structure-aware stylized images with high resolution using a Fine Network with three structural selective fusion (SSF) modules. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through the generation of appealing high-quality stylization results and a com-parison with some state-of-the-art style transfer methods.