Deep Compression on Convolutional Neural Network for Artistic Style Transfer

Deep artistic style transfer is popular yet costly as it is computationally expensive to generate artistic images using deep neural networks. We first ignore the network and only try an optimization method to generate artistic pictures, but the variation is limited. Then we speed up the style transfer by deep compression on the CNN layers of VGG. We simply remove inner ReLU functions within each convolutional block, such that each block containing two to three convolutional operation layers with ReLU in between collapses to a fully connected layer followed by a ReLU and a pooling layer. We use activation vectors in the modified network to morph the generated image. Experiments show that using the same loss function of Gatys et al. for style transfer the compressed neural network is competitive to the original VGG but is 2 to 3 times faster. The deep compression on convolutional neural networks shows alternative ways of generating artistic pictures.