Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization

This article discusses a technique called instance normalization that can make style transfer models faster and produce better-looking results. The key is a small change in the processing step that leads to cleaner colors, fewer artifacts, and more natural-looking art.

Details

The article describes how using instance normalization instead of the usual normalization technique can significantly improve the performance and visual quality of style transfer models. By making this small tweak in the model architecture, the generator learns to produce stylized images with sharper lines, more pleasing tones, and fewer odd patches or artifacts. This means artists and apps can now create stylized photos in real-time, even on devices with limited computing power. The key insight is that this simple change in a single processing step has an outsized impact on the entire system, leading to steadier, more natural-looking artistic results.