Photorealistic style transfer for video

Zabaleta, Itziar; Bertalmío, Marcelo

doi:http://doi.org/10.1016/j.image.2021.116240

Photorealistic style transfer for video

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Citation

Zabaleta I, Bertalmío M. Photorealistic style transfer for video. Signal Process Image Commun. 2021;95:116240. DOI: 10.1016/j.image.2021.116240

Abstract

This work proposes an efficient example-based photorealistic style transfer algorithm for video. Given a source unprocessed video and a reference image color graded by an artist, we describe an automatic algorithm to transfer the visual style of the reference onto the source footage. Our approach builds upon the color transfer methods based on the statistical properties of images. These methods are fast and of low-complexity, therefore suitable for real-time implementations. Our contribution is to adapt those methods to be used for unprocessed video from cinema cameras, and optionally to incorporate regions of interest previously selected by the user, affecting the final color transfer. The resulting videos are free from artifacts and provide an excellent approximation to the intended look, bringing savings in pre-production, shooting and post-production time. Results are free of spatio-temporal artifacts and the method outperforms diverse state-of-the-art methods according to observer preference experiments.