ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows

Jie An, Siyu Huang, Yibing Song, Dejing Dou, Wei Liu, Jiebo Luo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 862-871

Universal style transfer retains styles from reference images in content images. While existing methods have achieved state-of-the-art style transfer performance, they are not aware of the content leak phenomenon that the image content may corrupt after several rounds of stylization process. In this paper, we propose ArtFlow to prevent content leak during universal style transfer. ArtFlow consists of reversible neural flows and an unbiased feature transfer module. It supports both forward and backward inferences and operates in a projection-transfer-reversion scheme. The forward inference projects input images into deep features, while the backward inference remaps deep features back to input images in a lossless and unbiased way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtFlow achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art style transfer methods while avoiding content leak.