neural-art

Neural Style Transfer done from the CLI using a VGG backbone and presented as an MP4.

Weights can be downloaded from here. The downloaded file (renamed to vgg_conv_weights.pth) should be placed in ./weights/ and it will be ignored when pushing, as seen in ./.gitignore. Update: Alternatively, if the ./weights/ directory is empty, ./neuralart.py will automatically download publicly available VGG19 weights for the user.

More in depth information about Neural Style Transfer ( NST ) can be found in this great paper. Make sure to check Requirements and Usage as well as the Video Gallery.

Why use this in 2024 ?

Because Style Transfer hasn't changed drastically in terms of actual results in the past years. I personally find a certain beauty in inputting a style and content image rather than a well curated prompt with a dozen of switches. Consider this repo as a quick and simple just works solution that can run on both CPU and GPU effectively.

I developed this tool as a means to obtain fancy images and visuals for me and my friends. It somehow grew into something bigger that is actually usable, so much so that I got to integrate it in a workflow in conjunction with Stable Diffusion ( see also here ) which I want to develop a plugin for in the near future.

Requirements

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/xAlpharax/neural-art

# or via ssh
git clone git@github.com:xAlpharax/neural-art.git

Create a virtual environment to separate the required packages from system-wide packages:

virtualenv path/to/neural-art

source path/to/neural-art/bin/activate

( ! ) When you're finished with the environment:

# deactivate

All the required packages are listed in ./requirements.txt as per python etiquette:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

The main script sits comfortably in ./stylize.sh, run it from the project's root directory:

./stylize.sh path/to/style_image path/to/content_image

A helper script is also available to run ./stylize.sh for each distinct pair of images present in the ./Images/ directory:

./all.sh

Moreover, ./all.sh is aware of the already rendered mp4 files and will skip stylizing the combinations that are already present. In contrast, ./stylize.sh overwrites images and videos.

Output videos / images and temporary files

The stylization process outputs a video in the format ./content_in_style.mp4 with content and style being the 2nd and 1st command line arguments of the ./stylize.sh script.

If, at any point, you need the individual frames that comprise the generated ./content_in_style.mp4, check the ./Output/ directory for .png images with frames at each iteration. The ./neuralart.py code that sits at the heart of this project generates raw numpy array data to ./images.npy which in turn is manipulated by ./renderer.py to output frames as .png images.

These intermediary outputs are temporarily stored and get removed each time the ./stylize.sh script is run.

All the stylize combinations from the ./Images/ directory have been saved to this archive. Check the video gallery below to go through some of them that look the best:

Results - Click on dropdown menu for video gallery

Starry Night in various other styles 8

Starry_Night_in_Monet.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Azzalee.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Colorful.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Shade.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Abstract.mp4

Starry_Night_in_Gift.mp4

Starry_Night_in_bunnies.mp4

Monet in various other styles 7

Monet_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Monet_in_Azzalee.mp4

Monet_in_Colorful.mp4

Monet_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Monet_in_Shade.mp4

Monet_in_Abstract.mp4

Monet_in_bunnies.mp4

Colorful in various other styles 6

Colorful_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Colorful_in_Monet.mp4

Colorful_in_Azzalee.mp4

Colorful_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Colorful_in_Shade.mp4

Colorful_in_bunnies.mp4

Azzalee in various other styles 5

Azzalee_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Azzalee_in_Monet.mp4

Azzalee_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Azzalee_in_Shade.mp4

Azzalee_in_bunnies.mp4

Jitter Doll in various other styles 5

Jitter_Doll_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Jitter_Doll_in_Monet.mp4

Jitter_Doll_in_Azzalee.mp4

Jitter_Doll_in_Colorful.mp4

Jitter_Doll_in_Shade.mp4

Shade in various other styles 7

Shade_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Shade_in_Monet.mp4

Shade_in_Azzalee.mp4

Shade_in_Colorful.mp4

Shade_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Shade_in_bunnies.mp4

Shade_in_Abstract.mp4

Abstract in various other styles 6

Abstract_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Abstract_in_Monet.mp4

Abstract_in_Colorful.mp4

Abstract_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Abstract_in_Shade.mp4

Abstract_in_bunnies.mp4

Gift in various other styles 5

Gift_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Gift_in_Monet.mp4

Gift_in_Azzalee.mp4

Gift_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

Gift_in_Shade.mp4

kanade in various other styles 8

kanade_in_Starry_Night.mp4

kanade_in_Monet.mp4

kanade_in_Azzalee.mp4

kanade_in_Colorful.mp4

kanade_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

kanade_in_Shade.mp4

kanade_in_Abstract.mp4

kanade_in_bunnies.mp4

bunnies in various other styles 5

bunnies_in_Starry_Night.mp4

bunnies_in_Monet.mp4

bunnies_in_Azzalee.mp4

bunnies_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

bunnies_in_Shade.mp4

cute in various other styles 5

cute_in_Starry_Night.mp4

cute_in_Monet.mp4

cute_in_Colorful.mp4

cute_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

cute_in_Gift.mp4

kek in various other styles 2

kek_in_Jitter_Doll.mp4

kek_in_Shade.mp4

Tarantula reference:)

TARANTULA_in_Starry_Night.mp4

Contributing

Any sort of help, especially regarding the QoS ( Quality of Service ) of the project, is appreciated. Feel free to open an issue in the Issues tab and discuss the possible changes there. As of now, neural-art would be in great need of a clean and friendly arguments handler ( i.e. the one the argparse python package provides ) in order to accommodate to a cleaner interface for ./neuralart.py and / or ./stylize.sh.

Thank you. Happy neural-art-ing !