Stable Video Style Transfer Based on Partial Convolution with Depth-Aware Supervision

As a very important research issue in digital media art, neural learning based video style transfer has attracted more and more attention. A lot of recent works import optical flow method to original image style transfer framework to preserve frame-coherency and prevent flicker. However, these methods highly rely on paired video datasets of content video and stylized video, which are often difficult to obtain. Another limitation of existing methods is that while maintaining inter-frame coherency, they will introduce strong ghosting artifacts. In order to address these problems, this paper has following contributions: (1). presents a novel training framework for video style transfer without dependency on video dataset of target style; (2). firstly focuses on the ghosting problem existing in most previous works and uses partial convolution-based strategy to utilize inter-frame context and correlation, together with additional depth loss as a constrain to the generated frames to suppress ghosting artifacts and preserve stability at the same time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can produce natural and stable video frames with target style. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons also show that the proposed approach outperforms previous works in terms of overall image quality and inter-frame stability. To facilitate future research, we publish our experiment code at: //github. com/Huage001/Artistic-Video-Partial-Conv-Depth-Loss.