The line between the real and the computerized has been blurred even further! Cycle of conversion of photos to paintings is complete as an app is about to be released that can turn any painting into a high definition photograph! It was only a year when Prisma made all the headlines for converting pictures into potraits and paintings. Now we are about to go in the opposite direction.
Researchers at UC Berkeley’s AI Research Lab (BAIR) claim to have come up with a way to reconstruct photographs from paintings with a technique called “image-to-image translation.” The technology can also perform other awesome tasks such as converting any painting to different painters’ styles and even masterfully replacing objects in photos.
The research has been presented in a paper titled “Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks”. The technology involves interpreting and recognizing “special characteristics” in a painintg which are then translated into a photograph.
Below is an example of a Monet converted into a photograph:
Here Renoir’s style is applied to an image from Beauty and the Beast:
Amazingly so, the researchers were also able to turn the images into different painting styles, so you can take a Cezanne masterpiece and turn it into a Van Gogh or vice versa!
For the most astonishing feature of the app, the programmers have applied a technique called object transfiguration, which can replace an object in the picture to almost perfection. In the image below, this technique was used to turn apples into oranges and vice versa.
The technique is still a work in progress which means it can sometimes give some bizarre results as well.
You can learn more about it here.
