Towards ultra-resolution neural style transfer via thumbnail instance normalization

Abstract

We present an extremely simple Ultra-Resolution Style Transfer framework, termed URST, to flexibly process arbitrary high-resolution images (e.g., 10000x10000 pixels) style transfer for the first time. Most of the existing state-of-the-art methods would fall short due to massive memory cost and small stroke size when processing ultra-high resolution images. URST completely avoids the memory problem caused by ultra-high resolution images by (1) dividing the image into small patches and (2) performing patch-wise style transfer with a novel Thumbnail Instance Normalization (TIN). Specifically, TIN can extract thumbnail features' normalization statistics and apply them to small patches, ensuring the style consistency among different patches. Overall, the URST framework has three merits compared to prior arts. (1) We divide input image into small patches and adopt TIN, successfully transferring image style with arbitrary high-resolution. (2) Experiments show that our URST surpasses existing SOTA methods on ultra-high resolution images benefiting from the effectiveness of the proposed stroke perceptual loss in enlarging the stroke size. (3) Our URST can be easily plugged into most existing style transfer methods and directly improve their performance even without training.