Style Decomposition for Improved Neural Style Transfer

Universal Neural Style Transfer (NST) methods are capable of performing style transfer of arbitrary styles in a style-agnostic manner via feature transforms in (almost) real-time. Even though their unimodal parametric style modeling approach has been proven adequate to transfer a single style from relatively simple images, they are usually not capable of effectively handling more complex styles, producing significant artifacts, as well as reducing the quality of the synthesized textures in the stylized image. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose a novel universal NST approach that separately models each sub-style that exists in a given style image (or a collection of style images). This allows for better modeling the subtle style differences within the same style image and then using the most appropriate sub-style (or mixtures of different sub-styles) to stylize the content image. The ability of the proposed approach to a) perform a wide range of different stylizations using the sub-styles that exist in one style image, while giving the ability to the user to appropriate mix the different sub-styles, b) automatically match the most appropriate sub-style to different semantic regions of the content image, improving existing state-of-the-art universal NST approaches, and c) detecting and transferring the sub-styles from collections of images are demonstrated through extensive experiments.