Universal Video Style Transfer via Crystallization, Separation, and Blending

Abstract

Universal video style transfer aims to migrate arbitrary styles to input videos. However, how to maintain the temporal consistency of videos while achieving high-quality arbitrary style transfer is still a hard nut to crack. To resolve this dilemma, in this paper, we propose the CSBNet which involves three key modules: 1) the Crystallization (Cr) Module that generates several orthogonal crystal nuclei, representing hierarchical stability-aware content and style components, from raw VGG features; 2) the Separation (Sp) Module that separates these crystal nuclei to generate the stability-enhanced content and style features; 3) the Blending (Bd) Module to cross-blend these stability-enhanced content and style features, producing more stable and higher-quality stylized videos. Moreover, we also introduce a new pair of component enhancement losses to improve network performance. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our CSBNet. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, it not only produces temporally more consistent and stable results for arbitrary videos but also achieves higher-quality stylizations for arbitrary images.