Cascade Style Transfer

Zhizhong Wang, Lei Zhao, Qihang Mo, Sihuan Lin, Zhiwen Zuo, Wei Xing, Dongming Lu

Keywords: style transfer, cascade, quality, flexibility, domain-independent, serial, parallel

Abstract: Recent studies have made tremendous progress in style transfer for specific domains, e.g., artistic, semantic and photo-realistic. However, existing approaches have limited flexibility in extending to other domains, as different style representations are often specific to particular domains. This also limits the stylistic quality. To address these limitations, we propose Cascade Style Transfer, a simple yet effective framework that can improve the quality and flexibility of style transfer by combining multiple existing approaches directly. Our cascade framework contains two architectures, i.e., Serial Style Transfer (SST) and Parallel Style Transfer (PST). The SST takes the stylized output of one method as the input content of the others. This could help improve the stylistic quality. The PST uses a shared backbone and a loss module to optimize the loss functions of different methods in parallel. This could help improve the quality and flexibility, and guide us to find domain-independent approaches. Our experiments are conducted on three major style transfer domains: artistic, semantic and photo-realistic. In all these domains, our methods have shown superiority over the state-of-the-art methods.