Style Transfer with Keras
All art is at once surface and symbol.
All art is quite useless.
From Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The slides from a talk I gave on neural networks and style transfer are available here.
Without me telling you engaging stories while you look at them, I hope that something is lost. But some of them are pretty, and I hope they give a feel for the effect that the parameters have on the final image.
I've copied some of the images to this page to give an idea - for more, see the slides.
The input image for many of the examples is this view of Nottingham, the location of the conference:
![](https://iainhaslam.com/images/nottingham.jpg)
Input image
![](https://iainhaslam.com/images/nottingham_2.jpg)
In the style of Starry Night
Big Bold Colours
Since everyone knows what a Starry Night looks like, here's something by Matisse with big bold colours:
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/snail.jpg)
The Snail
More Bold
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/guitar.jpg)
Picasso's Guitar
Thomas Bewick's Bear
I deliberately showed examples where the algorithm failed. Here's one - the slides show one way of removing those white erasures.
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/bewick_bear.jpg)
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/bewick_bear_nottingham.jpg)
A Breakout Image
This style was used because of an earlier presentation about teaching neural networks to play Atari games, also using Keras.
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/breakout.jpg)
Breakout
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/breakout_nottingham.jpg)
Not bad
Velazquez
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/diego_velazquez.jpg)
The dappling is art, not compression artifact
![](https://iainhaslam.com/slides/images/showntell/diego_velazquez_nottingham.jpg)
Voyager Animation
The beautiful animation of Voyager below flickers because the starting image for each frame is a different random set of values. It shows that the outcome is sensitive to the starting condition, but not critically so. In the slides there is another version where I used the same initial condition for each. The flickering is replaced with twinkling, because the optimizer is non-deterministic.
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