Computational Decomposition of Style for Controllable and Enhanced Style Transfer

Neural style transfer has been demonstrated to be powerful in creating artistic images with help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but continuously controllable transfer is still a challenging task. This paper provides a computational decomposition of the style into basic factors, which aim to be factorized, interpretable representations of the artistic styles. We propose to decompose the style by not only spectrum based methods including Fast Fourier Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform, but also latent variable models such as Principal Component Analysis, Independent Component Analysis, and so on. Such decomposition induces various ways of controlling the style factors to generate enhanced, diversified styled images. We mix or intervene the style basis from more than one styles so that compound style or new style could be generated to produce styled images. To implement our method, we derive a simple, effective computational module, which can be embedded into state-of-the-art style transfer algorithms. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on not only painting style transfer but also other possible applications such as picture-to-sketch problems.