A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization

Contribution:

Our method consists of a stylization step and a smoothing step. Both have a closed-form solution and can be computed efficiently. The stylization step is based on the whitening and coloring transform (WCT) , which stylizes images via feature projections. The WCT was designed for artistic stylization. Similar to the neural style transfer algorithm, it suffers from structural artifacts when applied to photorealistic image stylization. Our WCT-based stylization step resolves the issue by utilizing a novel network design for feature transform. The WCT-based stylization step alone may generate spatially inconsistent stylizations. We resolve this issue by the proposed smoothing step, which is based on a manifold ranking algorithm. We conduct extensive experimental validation with the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods. User study results show that our method generates outputs with better stylization effects and fewer artifacts.