Image Artistic Style Transfer Based on Color Distribution Preprocessing

Style transfer is an increasingly popular field that can capture the styles of a particular artwork and use them to synthesize a new image with specific content. Previous NST algorithms have the limitation to transfer styles to correct regions in the output image. Therefore, some regions in the output image have deformed structures of the source image. In this paper, we propose a color preprocessing-based neural style transfer method to overcome the limitation. To reduce impacts caused by color differences between source image and style, we propose three models based on a color iterative distribution transform algorithm (IDT). The first one is named original color-preprocessed (OCp) model, which uses IDT to transform the color probability density function (PDF) of source image into that of style image. The second one is named exposure-corrected original color-preprocessed (EC-OCp) model, which adds an automatic detail-enhanced exposure correction module before OCp model. When source image is underexposed, EC-OCp model can achieve better results than OCp model. The third one is style color-preprocessed (SCp) model. It uses IDT to transform the color PDF of style image into that of source image. The original structures are well protected in the output image. According to experiments, the proposed models are robust to the source images with more conditions. Therefore, they have more usage values than the original method.