Papers › Rethinking Style Transfer: From Pixels to Parameterized Brushstrokes

Rethinking Style Transfer: From Pixels to Parameterized Brushstrokes

31 Mar 2021CVPR 2021 1arXiv:2103.17185archive 2025-07-28

Dmytro Kotovenko, Matthias Wright, Arthur Heimbrecht, Björn Ommer

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.

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