Algorithms Can Turn Any Scene into a Comic

Making your own Picasso isn’t the only thing neural style transfer can do

From left to right: the original graphic image, the target image, and the resulting stylized image. Images courtesy of Maciej Pęśko and Tomasz Trzciński

By Emerging Technology from the arXiv

Comics take the form of a series of still images that together tell a story. The images are often highly stylized and the graphic artists admired for their skill.

But this kind of artistry is hard to learn and difficult to perfect, making it time consuming and expensive to produce. So artists, publishers, and readers would dearly love an automated way to make an image imitate a desired comic style.

It turns out that this kind of algorithm already exists. Back in 2015, a group of researchers in Germany discovered a way to transfer the artistic style of one image to another. Since then, others have steadily improved this approach to make it quicker and more accurate.

However, the work has so far focused on transferring the style of fine artists such as Picasso and Van Gogh to other images, or altering ordinary pictures in ways like turning night into day. How well do these algorithms work with the often more stylized images produced by comic artists?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Maciej Pęśko and Tomasz Trzciński at Warsaw University of Technology in Poland. These guys have…