Rethinking Style Transfer: From Pixels to Parameterized Brushstrokes

Dmytro Kotovenko, Matthias Wright, Arthur Heimbrecht, Bjorn Ommer; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 12196-12205

Abstract


There have been many successful implementations of neural style transfer in recent years. In most of these works, the stylization process is confined to the pixel domain. However, we argue that this representation is unnatural because paintings usually consist of brushstrokes rather than pixels. We propose a method to stylize images by optimizing parameterized brushstrokes instead of pixels and further introduce a simple differentiable rendering mechanism. Our approach significantly improves visual quality and enables additional control over the stylization process such as controlling the flow of brushstrokes through user input. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations that show the efficacy of the proposed parameterized representation.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Kotovenko_2021_CVPR, author = {Kotovenko, Dmytro and Wright, Matthias and Heimbrecht, Arthur and Ommer, Bjorn}, title = {Rethinking Style Transfer: From Pixels to Parameterized Brushstrokes}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2021}, pages = {12196-12205} }