Soft segmentation-guided bipartite graph image stylization

In this paper, we propose a photo stylistic brush, an automatic robust style transfer approach based on soft segmentation-guided bipartite graph. A two-step bipartite graph algorithm with different granularity levels is employed to aggregate pixels into superpixel and find their correspondences. In the first step, with the extracted hierarchical features, a bipartite graph is constructed to describe the content similarity for pixel partition to produce superpixels. In the second step, superpixels in the input/reference image are rematched to form a new soft segmentation-guided bipartite graph, and superpixel-level correspondences are generated by a bipartite matching. Finally, the refined correspondence guides our approach to perform the transfer in a decorrelated color space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method for transferring various styles of exemplar images, even for some challenging cases, such as night images.