DualAST: Dual Style-Learning Networks for Artistic Style Transfer

Haibo Chen, Lei Zhao, Zhizhong Wang, Huiming Zhang, Zhiwen Zuo, Ailin Li, Wei Xing, Dongming Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 872-881

Artistic style transfer is an image editing task that aims at repainting everyday photographs with learned artistic styles. Existing methods learn styles from either a single style example or a collection of artworks. Accordingly, the stylization results are either inferior in visual quality or limited in style controllability. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Dual Style-Learning Artistic Style Transfer (DualAST) framework to learn simultaneously both the holistic artist-style (from a collection of artworks) and the specific artwork-style (from a single style image): the artist-style sets the tone (i.e., the overall feeling) for the stylized image, while the artwork-style determines the details of the stylized image, such as color and texture. Moreover, we introduce a Style-Control Block (SCB) to adjust the styles of generated images with a set of learnable style-control factors. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, the results of which confirm the superiority of our method.