Understanding Generalized Whitening and Coloring Transform for Universal Style Transfer Tai-Yin Chiu University of Texas as Austin
[email protected] Abstract while having remarkable results, it suffers from computa- tional inefficiency. To overcome this issue, a few methods Style transfer is a task of rendering images in the styles [10, 13, 20] that use pre-computed neural networks to ac- of other images. In the past few years, neural style transfer celerate the style transfer were proposed. However, these has achieved a great success in this task, yet suffers from methods are limited by only one transferrable style and can- either the inability to generalize to unseen style images or not generalize to other unseen styles. StyleBank [1] ad- fast style transfer. Recently, an universal style transfer tech- dresses this limit by controlling the transferred style with nique that applies zero-phase component analysis (ZCA) for style filters. Whenever a new style is needed, it can be whitening and coloring image features realizes fast and ar- learned into filters while holding the neural network fixed. bitrary style transfer. However, using ZCA for style transfer Another method [3] proposes to train a conditional style is empirical and does not have any theoretical support. In transfer network that uses conditional instance normaliza- addition, other whitening and coloring transforms (WCT) tion for multiple styles. Besides these two, more methods than ZCA have not been investigated. In this report, we [2, 7, 21] to achieve arbitrary style transfer are proposed. generalize ZCA to the general form of WCT, provide an an- However, they partly solve the problem and are still not able alytical performance analysis from the angle of neural style to generalize to every unseen style.