Neural-style
Version: Git Web: http://bit.ly/Neural-Style
Ever wondered how auction houses set prices for their auctions and why certain things are so expensive? Despite the fact that most of us are not involved in the art business, each and every Linux user has the potential to get a little closer to painting a masterpiece and, who knows, maybe cashing in on that highly manipulated market. And no, you don’t need to attend classes, all you need is some decent source material and a neural network.
Neural Style is a wonderful piece of open source software, which bridges the gap between science and art, and brings the study A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style (by A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge) closer to reality. The idea behind Neural Style is to combine two images in such a manner that one image gets style features from another. Typically, you may want to use one of your photographs and combine it with anything you want from the world of art, such as a world-famous painting, a pattern or textures etc. The algorithm uses convolutional neural networks and a data model for analysing the reference image and extracting its contents and presents you the target result.
NeuralStyle isn’t hard to install and use. The project offers a straightforward manual for installation, which applies, at least, for Ubuntu and Fedora and consists of few simple steps. These include installing Torch7 (a scientific computing framework), Loadcaffe (a C port of Matlab’s convolutional nets library) and NeuralStyle itself. After you are finished with that, use the following syntax to process your images: $ th neural_style.lua -style_image <image.jpg> -content_image <image. jpg>
NeuralStyle needs a lot of horsepower to do its job, so try with small images first and prepare to wait for an hour or two. If you have a capable Nvidia graphics card, installing CUDA libraries as an optional component can greatly improve the NeuralStyle performance by offloading some computing stuff to GPU.
“Neural Style bridges the gap between science and art.”