I jumped on the “Deep Style” craze a few months ago, and because I have a powerful machine I tried running a popular implementation called Neural Style to generate images. Neural Style is similar to “Deep Dream,” however it’s trained on a different model and it’s goal is to ‘deconstruct’ images and ‘reconstruct’ a new image using the ‘style’ of some images and the ‘content’ of another. Other popular services – mainly web-based but there are a few mobile apps with a similar idea – exist for this purpose, but the most freedom is gained by using a program on your own machine.
For ease-of-use, I quickly built a desktop environment around the process. I had shell scripts, files for settings, and context menu options to choose the inputs and start the process. However, I wanted something with more immediate feedback of the input/output combinations and with the ability to compare and contrast various parameter changes. So, I set out to build an application that would allow me to tweak the parameters and preview the results. As I used it I found numerous areas to improve the process, so it grew out of usage rather than planning. I’ve been using the program for weeks now without many changes, so I decided to release it as the ‘initial’ version with the hope that many others will find it eases the process of generating “Deep Style” images and that it can be improved by myself or others based on user feedback.
Further updates will be posted on the Neural Style GUI Page and GitHub.
