texture_nets

Real-time neural style transfer is not new; in the past year there have been several academic papers [1-4] on this topic and several open-source code releases: https://github.com/jcjohnson/fast-neural-style https://github.com/DmitryUlyanov/texture_nets https://github.com/chuanli11/MGANs Neural style blending is also not new; I did it more than a year ago using optimization-based method: https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style#multiple-style-ima... The novelty of this work is a clever way for training a single network that can apply many different styles; existing methods for real-time style transfer train separate networks per style. Their method also allows for real-time style blending, which is very cool and to my knowledge has not been done before. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of [2]) [1] Ulyanov et al, "Texture Networks: Feed-forward

They are probably using a newer approach, where they pre-train a neural network and use forward propagation only. With this technique, applying the effect can take less than one second. See https://github.com/DmitryUlyanov/texture_nets for more details. You can also try it here: http://turbo.deepart.io/

This uses the code for the "Texture Networks: Feed-forward Synthesis of Textures and Stylized Images" paper, found at https://github.com/DmitryUlyanov/texture_nets