28 September 2021 UMFA: a photorealistic style transfer method based on U-Net and multi-layer feature aggregation
Dongyu Rao, Xiao-Jun Wu, Hui Li, Josef Kittler, Tianyang Xu
Author Affiliations +
Funded by: National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
Abstract

We propose a photorealistic style transfer network to emphasize the natural effect of photorealistic image stylization. In general, distortion of the image content and lacking of details are two typical issues in the style transfer field. To this end, we design a framework employing the U-Net structure to maintain the rich spatial clues, with a multi-layer feature aggregation (MFA) method to simultaneously provide the details obtained by the shallow layers in the stylization processing. In particular, an encoder based on the dense block and a decoder form a symmetrical structure of U-Net are jointly staked to realize an effective feature extraction and image reconstruction. In addition, a transfer module based on MFA and “adaptive instance normalization” is inserted in the skip connection positions to achieve the stylization. Accordingly, the stylized image possesses the texture of a real photo and preserves rich content details without introducing any mask or postprocessing steps. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a more faithful structural similarity with a lower style loss, reflecting the effectiveness and merit of our approach.

© 2021 SPIE and IS&T 1017-9909/2021/$28.00 © 2021 SPIE and IS&T
Dongyu Rao, Xiao-Jun Wu, Hui Li, Josef Kittler, and Tianyang Xu "UMFA: a photorealistic style transfer method based on U-Net and multi-layer feature aggregation," Journal of Electronic Imaging 30(5), 053013 (28 September 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.30.5.053013
Received: 27 January 2021; Accepted: 10 June 2021; Published: 28 September 2021
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Computer programming

Image processing

Image enhancement

Feature extraction

Image restoration

Neural networks

Distortion

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