Revisiting Artistic Style Transfer for Data Augmentation in A Real-Case Scenario

A tremendous number of techniques have been proposed to transfer artistic style from one image to another. In particular, techniques exploiting neural representation of data; from Convolutional Neural Networks to Generative Adversarial Networks. However, most of these techniques do not accurately account for the semantic information related to the objects present in both images or require a considerable training set. In this paper, we provide a data augmentation technique that is as faithful as possible to the style of the reference artist, while requiring as few training samples as possible, as artworks containing the same semantics of an artist are usually rare. Hence, this paper aims to improve the state-of-the-art by first applying semantic segmentation on both images to then transfer the style from the painting to a photo while preserving common semantic regions. The method is exemplified on Van Gogh’s paintings, shown to be challenging to segment.