Photorealistic Style Transfer with Screened Poisson Equation

Recent work has shown impressive success in transferring painterly style to images. These approaches, however, fall short of photorealistic style transfer. Even when both the input and reference images are photographs, the output still exhibits distortions reminiscent of a painting. In this paper we propose an approach that takes as input a stylized image and makes it more photorealistic. It relies on the Screened Poisson Equation, maintaining the fidelity of the stylized image while constraining the gradients to those of the original input image. Our method is fast, simple, fully automatic and shows positive progress in making a stylized image photorealistic. Our results exhibit finer details and are less prone to artifacts than the state-of-the-art.Comment: presented in BMVC 201

CAP-VSTNet: Content Affinity Preserved Versatile Style Transfer

Content affinity loss including feature and pixel affinity is a main problem which leads to artifacts in photorealistic and video style transfer. This paper proposes a new framework named CAP-VSTNet, which consists of a new reversible residual network and an unbiased linear transform module, for versatile style transfer. This reversible residual network can not only preserve content affinity but not introduce redundant information as traditional reversible networks, and hence facilitate better stylization. Empowered by Matting Laplacian training loss which can address the pixel affinity loss problem led by the linear transform, the proposed framework is applicable and effective on versatile style transfer. Extensive experiments show that CAP-VSTNet can produce better qualitative and quantitative results in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 202

Ref-NPR: Reference-Based Non-Photorealistic Radiance Fields for Controllable Scene Stylization

Current 3D scene stylization methods transfer textures and colors as styles using arbitrary style references, lacking meaningful semantic correspondences. We introduce Reference-Based Non-Photorealistic Radiance Fields (Ref-NPR) to address this limitation. This controllable method stylizes a 3D scene using radiance fields with a single stylized 2D view as a reference. We propose a ray registration process based on the stylized reference view to obtain pseudo-ray supervision in novel views. Then we exploit semantic correspondences in content images to fill occluded regions with perceptually similar styles, resulting in non-photorealistic and continuous novel view sequences. Our experimental results demonstrate that Ref-NPR outperforms existing scene and video stylization methods regarding visual quality and semantic correspondence. The code and data are publicly available on the project page at https://ref-npr.github.io.Comment: Accepted by CVPR2023. 17 pages, 20 figures. Project page: https://ref-npr.github.io, Code: https://github.com/dvlab-research/Ref-NP

Ultrafast Photorealistic Style Transfer via Neural Architecture Search

The key challenge in photorealistic style transfer is that an algorithm should faithfully transfer the style of a reference photo to a content photo while the generated image should look like one captured by a camera. Although several photorealistic style transfer algorithms have been proposed, they need to rely on post- and/or pre-processing to make the generated images look photorealistic. If we disable the additional processing, these algorithms would fail to produce plausible photorealistic stylization in terms of detail preservation and photorealism. In this work, we propose an effective solution to these issues. Our method consists of a construction step (C-step) to build a photorealistic stylization network and a pruning step (P-step) for acceleration. In the C-step, we propose a dense auto-encoder named PhotoNet based on a carefully designed pre-analysis. PhotoNet integrates a feature aggregation module (BFA) and instance normalized skip links (INSL). To generate faithful stylization, we introduce multiple style transfer modules in the decoder and INSLs. PhotoNet significantly outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. In the P-step, we adopt a neural architecture search method to accelerate PhotoNet. We propose an automatic network pruning framework in the manner of teacher-student learning for photorealistic stylization. The network architecture named PhotoNAS resulted from the search achieves significant acceleration over PhotoNet while keeping the stylization effects almost intact. We conduct extensive experiments on both image and video transfer. The results show that our method can produce favorable results while achieving 20-30 times acceleration in comparison with the existing state-of-the-art approaches. It is worth noting that the proposed algorithm accomplishes better performance without any pre- or post-processing