Prisma was a viral photo filter app which many of us have forgotten. But Facebook and Google both are now working on same concept to integrate art-filters into their products. Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the video confirming Facebook’s development on this. Now, Google has officially confirmed that the company is also working on same thing.
Google calls this process “Style Transfer”. With Style transfer, images can be rendered in any of users’ favorite art by using phone or web apps.
Google has moved to a step ahead and tried mixing various arts to get unique results. Yes, we have different kind of arts which already provide amazing results. But try to explore the unique mixtures of well known artists and see how amazing results you get. In this way, you can not just use the existing art filters but you can also create your own filters.
Google knows that we have technology to achieve transformation into single art work. But this could be better to combine multiple art work filters and this is the reason Google Engineers started working on it. They also published a research paper “A Learned Representation for Artistic Style” explaining the method to allow a single deep convolutional style transfer network to learn multiple styles at the same time.
It is worth to note that Google has worked on this tech to get filters on both images and videos on real-time. So, you can apply filters, mix multiple filters and get a desired effect on real-time.
In the video below, multiple styles are combined in real-time and the resulting style is applied using a single style transfer network.
Technology to transfer the style of one image to another is not new and it has been into existence for around 15 years. Prisma used this and created buzz all over the Internet. But, it made Google realised how this can be improved to make something users will take interest for longer time. Google started from here and observed many artists to create a knowledge base of brush stroke techniques and color palettes. Google trained its system to use all test techniques and create a unique style of art work. And all these things in real-time.
Here are four styles being combined in different proportions on a photograph of Tübingen:
Unlike previous methods, this method of modeling multiple styles at the same time opens the door to exciting new ways for users to use style transfer algorithms and get better results. It will also make the whole work interesting.
While Facebook and Google both companies are working on this kind of style transfer tech, it will be interesting to see how this thing will go in future. Prisma also has a tough journey ahead which will have to fight to maintain its existence.
