I worked hard this week end to implement an idea I got for doing style-transfer.
I’ve ended up with a prototype that is really capable, so I wanted to share some results with you.
There is still a lot of work and testing to do, to make it as a usable filter for everyone, but at this point I’m now pretty sure this will be done one day
Style transfer consists in transferring colors and textures from a “style” image to a “target” image.
Like in the example below, where I used the filter to transfer the style of the Van Gogh’s Starry Night to a photograph of a cat (so, generating the famous Starry Cat painting ).
Here are some results I got, with this filter prototype. I’ve run my experiments on a 4-core laptop (running Ubuntu Linux), and every result took less than 1 mn to generate, which is not real time but still reasonable.
I hope I will be able to release it soon !
The flaws in the original post are much more noticeable the larger the images are. The degree of success of the style transfer seems to depend on the final viewing size of the image. E.g., the images in the OP looked fine on mobile but not on a larger laptop screen; and if the pattern is too small or dense, it would be inappropriate on a smaller image.
I’ve made some progress today, and the results are often better than with my previous version.
Still a lot of things to experiments and room for improvements, but I’m on the right way.
Hopefully it will be ready before X-mas
Would we be able to place point to point feature matching? Like, if I put one point on the reference image, and another point on the target image, the style transfer filter would utilize the pointed area on the reference image to the target image.
I feel like a simple filter with a few parameters and a more complicated one (an ‘advanced mode’) with loads more would do the trick, allowing both smoothly-made stuff and nutty experimental rubbish at the same time depending on what one’s after.
Really cool stuff, David. Actually use Style Windows (from Give-a-away of the Days site a few months back) as well as visit Google’s Deep Dream site on occasion (low rez for both; Style Windows is very taxing on my system resources so can only run on low rez images). Look forward to experimenting with your preset soon.
).
I am sure machine learning is coming along too. 
The flaws in the original post are much more noticeable the larger the images are. The degree of success of the style transfer seems to depend on the final viewing size of the image. E.g., the images in the OP looked fine on mobile but not on a larger laptop screen; and if the pattern is too small or dense, it would be inappropriate on a smaller image.
