As an artist I find it very frustrating when people try to apply style transfer type techniques in an attempt to emulate an artist like Picasso. It kinda works and generates a bunch of hype but it isn't even close. The reason it's frustrating is because I think Deep Learning is <i>actually</i> capable of doing this stuff but the people implementing need to understand how Picasso actually did his work.<p>If you look at cubism the whole idea is to capture multiple sides of a 3-Dimensional object at once. A lot of art is not a "style" but rather a projection from 3D (or 4D) space to 2D space.<p>If you wanted to paint a "dog" in the style of Picasso your network would need to understand the geometry of a dog.<p>Training on a bunch of 2D before and after training examples is underspecified.<p>It's important to understand that it is a mapping from 3D -> 2D ... <i>NOT</i> 2D->2D<p>Another example is "Nude Descending a Staircase" by Duchamp:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_N...</a><p>It is a painting describing motion. To apply style transfer would be completely stupid because the point of the image is to project 4D->2D ... not to have wavy black and brown lines.
Why is everyone working on style transfer? It doesn't seem like such an interesting problem in the field, compared to things like speech recognition for example. Is it just because it's a "cracked" problem and it looks nice? I'm just genuinely curious here, not trying to bash the amazing work these people do.
Not sure how related this is but seems like the right crowd to ask...<p>As a photographer who also does programming full time I've been wondering what would need to happen to synthesize skin texture to remove imperfections. Example, removing small scars, wrinkles, etc. Currently I just use the healing brush in Photoshop but wondering if ML can be used to automatically do it.<p>Does anyone have any recommendations on what sub-fields or papers I could read to get a better idea of what would be involved to create a solution like that?