Understanding Neural Style Transfer with Tensorflow and Keras

Neural Style Transfer (NST)  is a fascinating area of Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks. NST is an interesting technique, in which the style from an image, known as the ‘style image’ is transferred to another image ‘content image’ and we get a third a image which is a generated image which has the content of the original image and the style of another image.

NST can be used to reimagine how famous painters like Van Gogh, Claude Monet or a Picasso would have visualised a scenery or architecture. NST uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to achieve this artistic style transfer from one image to another. NST was originally implemented by Gati et al., in their paper Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style. Convolutional Neural Networks have been very successful in image classification image recognition et cetera. CNN networks have also been have also generated very interesting pictures using Neural Style Transfer which will be shown in this post. An interesting aspect of CNN’s is that the first couple of layers in the CNN capture basic features of the image like edges and  pixel values. But as we go deeper into the CNN, the network captures higher level features of the input image.

To get started with Neural Style transfer  we will be using the VGG19 pre-trained network. The VGG19 CNN is a compact pre-trained your network which can be used for performing the NST. However, we could have also used Resnet or InceptionV3 networks for this purpose but these are very large networks. The idea of using a network trained on a different task and applying it to a new task is called transfer learning.

What needs to be done to transfer the style from one of the image to another image. This brings us to the question – What is ‘style’? What is it that distinguishes Van Gogh’s painting or Picasso’s cubist art. Convolutional Neural Networks capture basic features in the lower layers and much more complex features in the deeper layers.  Style can be computed by taking the correlation of the feature maps in a layer L. This is my interpretation of how style is captured.  Since style  is intrinsic to  the image, it  implies that the style feature would exist across all the filters in a layer. Hence, to pick up this style we would need to get the correlation of the filters across channels of a lawyer. This is computed mathematically, using the Gram matrix which calculates the correlation of the activation of a the filter by the style image and generated image

To transfer the style from one image to the content image we need to do two parallel operations while doing forward propagation
– Compute the content loss between the source image and the generated image
– Compute the style loss between the style image and the generated image
– Finally we need to compute the total loss

In order to get transfer the style from the ‘style’ image to the ‘content ‘image resulting in a  ‘generated’  image  the total loss has to be minimised. Therefore backward propagation with gradient descent  is done to minimise the total loss comprising of the content and style loss.

Initially we make the Generated Image ‘G’ the same as the source image ‘S’

The content loss at layer ‘l’

$L_{content} = 1/2 \sum_{i}^{j} ( F^{l}_{i,j} - P^{l}_{i,j})^{2}$

where $F^{l}_{i,j}$ and $P^{l}_{i,j}$ represent the activations at layer ‘l’ in a filter i, at position ‘j’. The intuition is that the activations will be same for similar source and generated image. We need to minimise the content loss so that the generated stylized image is as close to the original image as possible. An intermediate layer of VGG19 block5_conv2 is used

The Style layers that are are used are

style_layers = [‘block1_conv1’,
‘block2_conv1’,
‘block3_conv1’,
‘block4_conv1’,
‘block5_conv1’]
To compute the Style Loss the Gram matrix needs to be computed. The Gram Matrix is computed by unrolling the filters as shown below (source: Convolutional Neural Networks by Prof Andrew Ng, Coursera). The result is a matrix of size $n_{c}$ x $n_{c}$ where $n_{c}$ is the number of channels
The above diagram shows the filters of height $n_{H}$ and width $n_{W}$ with $n_{C}$ channels
The contribution of layer ‘l’ to style loss is given by
$L^{'}_{style} = \frac{\sum_{i}^{j} (G^{2}_{i,j} - A^l{i,j})^2}{4N^{2}_{l}M^{2}_{l}}$
where $G_{i,j}$  and $A_{i,j}$ are the Gram matrices of the style and generated images respectively. By minimising the distance in the gram matrices of the style and generated image we can ensure that generated image is a stylized version of the original image similar to the style image
The total loss is given by
$L_{total} = \alpha L_{content} + \beta L_{style}$
Back propagation with gradient descent works to minimise the content loss between the source and generated image, while the style loss tries to minimise the discrepancies in the style of the style image and generated image. Running through forward and backpropagation through several epochs successfully transfers the style from the style image to the source image.
You can check the Notebook at Neural Style Transfer

Note: The code in this notebook is largely based on the Neural Style Transfer tutorial from Tensorflow, though I may have taken some changes from other blogs. I also made a few changes to the code in this tutorial, like removing the scaling factor, or the class definition (Personally, I belong to the old school (C language) and am not much in love with the ‘self.”..All references are included below

Note: Here is a interesting thought. Could we do a Neural Style Transfer in music? Imagine Carlos Santana playing ‘Hotel California’ or Brian May style in ‘Another brick in the wall’. While our first reaction would be that it may not sound good as we are used to style of these songs, we may be surprised by a possible style transfer. This is definitely music to the ears!

Here are few runs from this

A) Run 1

1. Neural Style Transfer – a) Content Image – My portrait.  b) Style Image – Wassily Kadinsky Oil on canvas, 1913, Vassily Kadinsky’s composition

2. Result of Neural Style Transfer

2) Run 2

a) Content Image – Portrait of my parents b) Style Image –  Vincent Van Gogh’s ,Starry Night Oil on canvas 1889

2. Result of Neural Style Transfer

Run 3

1.  Content Image – Caesar 2 (Masai Mara- 20 Jun 2018).  Style Image – The Great Wave at Kanagawa – Katsushika Hokosai, 1826-1833

2. Result of Neural Style Transfer

Run 4

1.   Content Image – Junagarh Fort , Rajasthan   Sep 2016              b) Style Image – Le Pont Japonais by Claude Monet, Oil on canvas, 1920

2. Result of Neural Style Transfer

Neural Style Transfer is a very ingenious idea which shows that we can segregate the style of a painting and transfer to another image.

References

1. A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style, Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge
2. Neural style transfer
3. Neural Style Transfer: Creating Art with Deep Learning using tf.keras and eager execution
4. Convolutional Neural Network, DeepLearning.AI Specialization, Prof Andrew Ng
5. Intuitive Guide to Neural Style Transfer

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Take 4+: Presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’ – Parts 1-8

“Lights, camera and … action – Take 4+!”

This post includes  a rework of all presentation of ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep  Learning Parts 1-8 ‘ since my earlier presentations had some missing parts, omissions and some occasional errors. So I have re-recorded all the presentations.
This series of presentation will do a deep-dive  into Deep Learning networks starting from the fundamentals. The equations required for performing learning in a L-layer Deep Learning network  are derived in detail, starting from the basics. Further, the presentations also discuss multi-class classification, regularization techniques, and gradient descent optimization methods in deep networks methods. Finally the presentations also touch on how  Deep Learning Networks can be tuned.

The corresponding implementations are available in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second edition- In vectorized Python, R and Octave

1. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 1
This presentation introduces Neural Networks and Deep Learning. A look at history of Neural Networks, Perceptrons and why Deep Learning networks are required and concluding with a simple toy examples of a Neural Network and how they compute. This part also includes a small digression on the basics of Machine Learning and how the algorithm learns from a data set

2. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 2
This presentation takes logistic regression as an example and creates an equivalent 2 layer Neural network. The presentation also takes a look at forward & backward propagation and how the cost is minimized using gradient descent

The implementation of the discussed 2 layer Neural Network in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my post ‘Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 1‘

3. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 3
This 3rd part, discusses a primitive neural network with an input layer, output layer and a hidden layer. The neural network uses tanh activation in the hidden layer and a sigmoid activation in the output layer. The equations for forward and backward propagation are derived.

To see the implementations for the above discussed video see my post ‘Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 2

4. Elements of Neural Network and Deep Learning – Part 4
This presentation is a continuation of my 3rd presentation in which I derived the equations for a simple 3 layer Neural Network with 1 hidden layer. In this video presentation, I discuss step-by-step the derivations for a L-Layer, multi-unit Deep Learning Network, with any activation function g(z)

The implementations of L-Layer, multi-unit Deep Learning Network in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 3

5. Elements of Neural Network and Deep Learning – Part 5
This presentation discusses multi-class classification using the Softmax function. The detailed derivation for the Jacobian of the Softmax is discussed, and subsequently the derivative of cross-entropy loss is also discussed in detail. Finally the final set of equations for a Neural Network with multi-class classification is derived.

The corresponding implementations in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in the following posts
a. Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 4
b. Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 5

6. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 6
This part discusses initialization methods specifically like He and Xavier. The presentation also focuses on how to prevent over-fitting using regularization. Lastly the dropout method of regularization is also discussed

The corresponding implementations in vectorized R, Python and Octave of the above discussed methods are available in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 6

7. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 7
This presentation introduces exponentially weighted moving average and shows how this is used in different approaches to gradient descent optimization. The key techniques discussed are learning rate decay, momentum method, rmsprop and adam.

The equivalent implementations of the gradient descent optimization techniques in R, Python and Octave can be seen in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 7

8. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 8
This last part touches on the method to adopt while tuning hyper-parameters in Deep Learning networks

Checkout my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles: Second Edition – In vectorized Python, R and Octave’. My book starts with the implementation of a simple 2-layer Neural Network and works its way to a generic L-Layer Deep Learning Network, with all the bells and whistles. The derivations have been discussed in detail. The code has been extensively commented and included in its entirety in the Appendix sections. My book is available on Amazon as paperback ($18.99) and in kindle version($9.99/Rs449).

This concludes this series of presentations on “Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’

To see all posts click Index of posts

My presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks & Deep Learning’ -Parts 6,7,8

This is the final set of presentations in my series ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’. This set follows the earlier 2 sets of presentations namely
1. My presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks & Deep Learning’ -Part1,2,3
2. My presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks & Deep Learning’ -Parts 4,5

In this final set of presentations I discuss initialization methods, regularization techniques including dropout. Next I also discuss gradient descent optimization methods like momentum, rmsprop, adam etc. Lastly, I briefly also touch on hyper-parameter tuning approaches. The corresponding implementations are available in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second edition- In vectorized Python, R and Octave

1. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 6
This part discusses initialization methods specifically like He and Xavier. The presentation also focuses on how to prevent over-fitting using regularization. Lastly the dropout method of regularization is also discusses

The corresponding implementations in vectorized R, Python and Octave of the above discussed methods are available in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 6

2. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 7
This presentation introduces exponentially weighted moving average and shows how this is used in different approaches to gradient descent optimization. The key techniques discussed are learning rate decay, momentum method, rmsprop and adam.

The equivalent implementations of the gradient descent optimization techniques in R, Python and Octave can be seen in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 7

3. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 8
This last part touches upon hyper-parameter tuning in Deep Learning networks

This concludes this series of presentations on “Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’

Important note: Do check out my later version of these videos at Take 4+: Presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’ – Parts 1-8 . These have more content and also include some corrections. Check it out!

Checkout my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles: Second Edition – In vectorized Python, R and Octave’. My book starts with the implementation of a simple 2-layer Neural Network and works its way to a generic L-Layer Deep Learning Network, with all the bells and whistles. The derivations have been discussed in detail. The code has been extensively commented and included in its entirety in the Appendix sections. My book is available on Amazon as paperback ($18.99) and and in kindle version($9.99/Rs449).

To see all posts click Index of posts

My presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks & Deep Learning’ -Parts 4,5

This is the next set of presentations on “Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning”.  In the 4th presentation I discuss and derive the generalized equations for a multi-unit, multi-layer Deep Learning network.  The 5th presentation derives the equations for a Deep Learning network when performing multi-class classification along with the derivations for cross-entropy loss. The corresponding implementations are available in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second edition- In vectorized Python, R and Octave

Important note: Do check out my later version of these videos at Take 4+: Presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’ – Parts 1-8 . These have more content and also include some corrections. Check it out!

1. Elements of Neural Network and Deep Learning – Part 4
This presentation is a continuation of my 3rd presentation in which I derived the equations for a simple 3 layer Neural Network with 1 hidden layer. In this video presentation, I discuss step-by-step the derivations for a L-Layer, multi-unit Deep Learning Network, with any activation function g(z)

The implementations of L-Layer, multi-unit Deep Learning Network in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my post Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 3

2. Elements of Neural Network and Deep Learning – Part 5
This presentation discusses multi-class classification using the Softmax function. The detailed derivation for the Jacobian of the Softmax is discussed, and subsequently the derivative of cross-entropy loss is also discussed in detail. Finally the final set of equations for a Neural Network with multi-class classification is derived.

The corresponding implementations in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in the following posts
a. Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 4
b. Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 5

To be continued. Watch this space!

Checkout my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles: Second Edition – In vectorized Python, R and Octave’. My book starts with the implementation of a simple 2-layer Neural Network and works its way to a generic L-Layer Deep Learning Network, with all the bells and whistles. The derivations have been discussed in detail. The code has been extensively commented and included in its entirety in the Appendix sections. My book is available on Amazon as paperback ($18.99) and in kindle version($9.99/Rs449).

To see all posts click Index of Posts

My presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks & Deep Learning’ -Part1,2,3

I will be uploading a series of presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’. In these video presentations I discuss the derivations of L -Layer Deep Learning Networks, starting from the basics. The corresponding implementations are available in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second edition- In vectorized Python, R and Octave

1. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 1
This presentation introduces Neural Networks and Deep Learning. A look at history of Neural Networks, Perceptrons and why Deep Learning networks are required and concluding with a simple toy examples of a Neural Network and how they compute

2. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 2
This presentation takes logistic regression as an example and creates an equivalent 2 layer Neural network. The presentation also takes a look at forward & backward propagation and how the cost is minimized using gradient descent

The implementation of the discussed 2 layer Neural Network in vectorized R, Python and Octave are available in my post ‘Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 1

3. Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning – Part 3
This 3rd part, discusses a primitive neural network with an input layer, output layer and a hidden layer. The neural network uses tanh activation in the hidden layer and a sigmoid activation in the output layer. The equations for forward and backward propagation are derived.

To see the implementations for the above discussed video see my post ‘Deep Learning from first principles in Python, R and Octave – Part 2

Important note: Do check out my later version of these videos at Take 4+: Presentations on ‘Elements of Neural Networks and Deep Learning’ – Parts 1-8 . These have more content and also include some corrections. Check it out!

To be continued. Watch this space!

Checkout my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles: Second Edition – In vectorized Python, R and Octave’. My book starts with the implementation of a simple 2-layer Neural Network and works its way to a generic L-Layer Deep Learning Network, with all the bells and whistles. The derivations have been discussed in detail. The code has been extensively commented and included in its entirety in the Appendix sections. My book is available on Amazon as paperback ($18.99) and in kindle version($9.99/Rs449).

To see all posts click Index of posts

My book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second Edition’ now on Amazon

The second edition of my book ‘Deep Learning from first principles:Second Edition- In vectorized Python, R and Octave’, is now available on Amazon, in both paperback ($18.99) and kindle ($9.99/Rs449/-)  versions. Since this book is almost 70% code, all functions, and code snippets have been formatted to use the fixed-width font ‘Lucida Console’. In addition line numbers have been added to all code snippets. This makes the code more organized and much more readable. I have also fixed typos in the book

The book includes the following chapters

Table of Contents
Preface 4
Introduction 6
1. Logistic Regression as a Neural Network 8
2. Implementing a simple Neural Network 23
3. Building a L- Layer Deep Learning Network 48
4. Deep Learning network with the Softmax 85
5. MNIST classification with Softmax 103
6. Initialization, regularization in Deep Learning 121
7. Gradient Descent Optimization techniques 167
8. Gradient Check in Deep Learning 197
1. Appendix A 214
2. Appendix 1 – Logistic Regression as a Neural Network 220
3. Appendix 2 - Implementing a simple Neural Network 227
4. Appendix 3 - Building a L- Layer Deep Learning Network 240
5. Appendix 4 - Deep Learning network with the Softmax 259
6. Appendix 5 - MNIST classification with Softmax 269
7. Appendix 6 - Initialization, regularization in Deep Learning 302
8. Appendix 7 - Gradient Descent Optimization techniques 344
9. Appendix 8 – Gradient Check 405
References 475

To see posts click Index of Posts

My book “Deep Learning from first principles” now on Amazon

Note: The 2nd edition of this book is now available on Amazon

My 4th book(self-published), “Deep Learning from first principles – In vectorized Python, R and Octave” (557 pages), is now available on Amazon in both paperback ($18.99) and kindle ($9.99/Rs449). The book starts with the most primitive 2-layer Neural Network and works  its way to a generic L-layer Deep Learning Network, with all the bells and whistles.  The book includes detailed derivations and vectorized implementations in Python, R and Octave.  The code has been extensively  commented and has been included in the Appendix section.