Style Transfer

HBO Vice Piece on CloudPainter - The da Vinci Coder

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Typically the pun applied to artistic robots make me cringe, but I actually liked HBO Vice's name for their segment on CloudPainter. they called me The Da Vinci Coder.  

Spent the day with them couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed their treatment of what I am trying to do with my art.  Not sure how you can access HBO Vice without HBO, but if you can it is a good description of where the state of the art is with artificial creativity.  If you can't, here are some stills from the episode and a brief description...

Hunter and I working on setting up a painting...

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One of my robots working on a portrait...

Elle asking some questions...

Cool shot of my paint covered hands...

One of my robots working on a portrait of Elle...

... and me walking Elle through some of the many algorithms, both borrowed and invented, that I use to get from a photograph of her to a finished stylized portrait below.

Hunter's Portrait

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Inspired by our trip to the National Portrait Gallery, we started thinking to ourselves, what's so impressive about making our robot's paint like a famous artist.  Sure they are inspirational and a lot can be learned from them, but when you think about it, people are more interested in the art of their loved ones.  

So this morning, Hunter and I decided to do quick portraits of each other and then run the portraits through deep neural nets to see how well they applied to a photo we took of each other. As soon as we started, Corinne joined in so here is obligatory photo of her helping out.

Also in the above photo you can see my abstract portrait in progress.

Below you can see the finished paintings and how they were applied to the photos we took. If you have been following this blog recently, you will know that the images along the top are the source images from which style is taken and applied to the photos on the left. This is all being done via Style Transfer and TensorFlow. Also I should note that the painting on left is mine, while Hunter's is on right. 

Most interesting thing about all this is that the creative agent remains Hunter and I, but still something is going on here. For example even though we were the creative agents, we drew some of our stylistic inspiration from other artist's paintings that we saw at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday. Couldn't a robot do something similar?

More work to be done.

Inspiration from the National Portrait Gallery

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One of the best things about Washington D.C. is its public art museums. There are about a dozen or so world class galleries where you are allowed to take photos and use the work in your own art, because after all, we the people own the paintings. Excited by the possibilities of deep learning and how well style transfer was working, the kids and I went to the National Portrait Gallery. for some inspiration.

One of the first things that occurred to us was a little inception like. What would happen if we applied style transfer to a portrait using itself as the source image.  It didn't turn out that well, but here are a couple of those anyways.

While this was idea of a dead end, the next idea that came to us was a little more promising. Looking at the successes and failures of the style transfers we had already performed, we started noticing that when the context and composition of the paintings matched, the algorithm was a lot more successful artistically. This is of course obvious in hindsight, but we are still working to understand what is happening in the deep neural networks, and anything that can reveal anythign about that is interesting to us.  

So the idea we had, which was fun to test out, was to try and apply the style of a painting to a photo that matched the painting's composition.  We selected two famous paintings from the National Portrait Gallery to attempt this, de Kooning's JFK and Degas's Portrait of Miss Cassatt. We used JFK  on a photo of Dante with a tie on. We also  had my mother pose best she can to resemble how Cassatt was seated in her portrait.  We then let the deep neaural net do its work. The following are the results.  Photo's courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

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Farideh likes how her portrait came out, as do we, but its interesting that this only goes to further demonstrate that there is so much more to a painting than just its style, texture, and color. So what did we learn. Well we knew it already but we need to figure out how to deal with texture and context better.

Applying Style Transfer to Portraits

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Hunter and I have been focusing on reverse engineering the three most famous paintings according to Google as well as a hand selected piece from the National Gallery.  These art works are The Mona Lisa, The Starry Night, The Scream, and Woman With A Parasol.

We also just recently got Style Transfer working on our own Tensor Flow system. So naturally we decided to take a moment to see how a neural net would paint using the four paintings we selected plus a second work by Van Gogh, his Self-Portrait (1889).  

Below is a grid of the results.  Across the top are the images from which style was transferred, and down the side are the images the styles were applied to. (Once again a special thanks to deepdreamgenerator.com for letting us borrow some of their processing power to get all these done.)

It is interesting to see where the algorithm did well and where it did little more than transfer the color and texture.  A good example of where it did well can be seen in the last column. Notice how the composition of the source style and the portrait it is being applied to line up almost perfectly. Well as could be expected, this resulted in a good transfer of style.

As far as failure. it is easy to notice lots of limitations. Foremost, I noticed that the photo being transferred needs to be high quality for the transfer to work well. Another problem is that the algorithm has no idea what it is doing with regards to composition.  For example, in The Scream style transfers, it paints a sunset across just about everyone's forehead.

We are still in processing of creating a step by step animation that will show one of the portraits having the style applied to it.  It will be a little while thought cause I am running it on a computer that can only generate one frame every 30 minutes.  This is super processor intensive stuff.

While processor is working on that we are going to go and see if we can't find a way to improve upon this algorithm.

 

 

 

 

Channeling Picasso with Style Transfer and Google's TensorFlow

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We are always jumping back and forth between hardware and software upgrades to our painting robot. This week it's the software. Pleased to report that we now have our own implemention of Dumoulin, Shlens, and Kudlar's Style Transfer. This of course is the Deep Learning algorithm that allows you to recreate content in the style of a source painting. 

The first image that we successfully created was made by transferring the style of Picasso's Guernica into a portrait of me in my studio.  

So here are the two images we started with. 

And the following is the image that the neural networks came up with.

I was able to get this neural net working thanks in large part to the step-by-step tutorial in this amazing blog post by LO at http://www.chioka.in/tensorflow-implementation-neural-algorithm-of-artistic-style. Cool thing about the Deep Learning community, is that I found half a dozen good tutorials. So if this one doesn't work out for you, just search out another.

Even cooler though, is that you don't even need to set up your own implementation. If you want to do your own Style Transfers, all you have to do is head on over to the Deep Dream Generator at deepdreamgenerator.com. On this site you can upload pictures and have their implementation generate your own custom Style Transfers.  There is even a way to upload your own source images and play with the settings.  

Below is a grid of images I created on the Deep Dream Generator site using the same content and source image that I used in my own implementation.  In them, I played around with the Style Scale and Style Weight settings. Top row has Scale set to 1.6, while second row is 1, and third is 0.4.  First column has the Weight set to 1, while second is at 5 and third is at 10.

So while I suggest you go through the pains of setting up your own implementation of Style Transfer, you don't even have to.  Deep Dream Generator lets you perform 10 style transfers an hour.

For us on the other hand, we need our own generator as this technology will be closely tied into all robot paintings going forward.

 

 

 

A Deeper Learning Analysis of The Scream

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Am a big fan of what The Google Brain Team, specifically scientists Vincent Dumoulin, Jonathon Shlens, and Majunath Kudlar, have accomplished with Style Transfer.  In short they have developed a way to take any photo and paint it in the style of a famous painting. The results are remarkable as can be seen in the following grid of original photos painted in the style of historical masterpieces.

However, as can be seen in the following pastiches of Munch's The Scream, there are a couple of systematic failures with the approach. The Deep Learning algorithm struggles to capture the flow of the brushstrokes or "match a human level understanding of painting abstraction." Notice how the only thing truly transferred is color and texture.

Seeing this limitation, I am currently attempting to improve upon Google's work by modeling both the brushstrokes and abstraction. In the same way that the color and texture is being successfully transferred, I want the actual brushstrokes and abstractions to resemble the original artwork.

So how would this be possible? While I am not sure how to achieve artistic abstraction, modeling the brushstrokes is definitely doable. So lets start there.

To model brushstrokes, Deep Learning would need brushstroke data, lots of brushstroke data. Simply put, Deep Learning needs accurate data to work. In the case of the Google's successful pastiches (an image made in style of an artwork), the data was found in the image of the masterpieces themselves. Deep Neural Nets would examine and re-examine the famous paintings on a micro and macro level to build a model that can be used to convert a provided photo into the painting's style. As mentioned previously, this works great for color and texture, but fails with the brushstrokes because it doesn't really have any data on how the artist applied the paint. While strokes can be seen on the canvas, there isn't a mapping of brushstrokes that could be studied and understood by the Deep Learning algorithms. 

As I pondered this limitation, I realized that I had this exact data, and lots of it.  I have been recording detailed brushstroke data for almost a decade. For many of my paintings each and every brushstroke has been recorded in a variety of formats including time-lapse videos, stroke maps, and most importantly, a massive database of the actual geometric paths. And even better, many of the brushstrokes were crowd sourced from internet users around the world - where thousands of people took control of my robots to apply millions of brushstrokes to hundreds of paintings. In short, I have all the data behind each of these strokes, all just waiting to be analyzed and modeled with Deep Learning.

This was when I looked at the systematic failures of pastiches made from Edvard Munch's The Scream's, and realized that I could capture Munch's brushstrokes and as a result make a better pastiche.  The approach to achieve this is pretty straight forward, though labor intensive.

This process all begins with the image and a palette.  I have no idea what Munch's original palette was, but the following is an approximate representation made by running his painting through k-means clustering and some of my own deduction.

With the painting and palette in hand, I then set cloudpainter up to paint in manual mode. To paint a replica, all I did was trace brushstrokes over the image on a touch screen display. The challenging part is painting the brushstrokes in the manner and order that I think Edvard Munch may have done them.  It is sort of an historical reenactment.

As I paint with my finger, these strokes are executed by the robot.

More importantly, each brushstroke is saved in an Elasticsearch database with detailed information on its exact geometry and color.

 

At the conclusion of this replica, detailed data exists for each and every brushstroke to the thousandth of an inch. This data can then be used as the basis for an even deeper Deep Learning analysis of Edvard Munch's The Scream. An analysis beyond color and texture, where his actual brushstrokes are modeled and understood.

So this brings us to whether or not abstraction can be captured.  And while I am not sure that it can, I think I have an approach that will work at least some of the time. To this end, I will be adding a second set of data that labels the context of The Scream. This will include geometric bounds around the various areas of the painting and be used to consider the subject matter in the image. So while The Google Brain Team used only an image of the painting for its pastiches, the process that I am trying to perfect will consider the the original artwork, the brushstrokes, and how brushstroke was applied to different parts of painting.

 

Ultimately it is believed that by considering all three of these data points, a pastiche made from The Scream will more accurately replicate the style of Edvard Munch. 

So yes, these are lofty goals and I am getting ahead of myself. First I need to collect as much brushstroke data as possible and I leave you now to return to that pursuit.