Name Your Style: An Arbitrary Artist-aware Image Style Transfer

Abstract: Image style transfer has attracted widespread attention in the past few years. Despite its remarkable results, it requires additional style images available as references, making it less flexible and inconvenient. Using text is the most natural way to describe the style. More importantly, text can describe implicit abstract styles, like styles of specific artists or art movements. In this paper, we propose a text-driven image style transfer (TxST) that leverages advanced image-text encoders to control arbitrary style transfer. We introduce a contrastive training strategy to effectively extract style descriptions from the image-text model (i.e., CLIP), which aligns stylization with the text description. To this end, we also propose a novel and efficient attention module that explores cross-attentions to fuse style and content features. Finally, we achieve an arbitrary artist-aware image style transfer to learn and transfer specific artistic characters such as Picasso, oil painting, or a rough sketch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both image and textual styles. Moreover, it can mimic the styles of one or many artists to achieve attractive results, thus highlighting a promising direction in image style transfer.