Face style transfer and removal with generative adversarial network

Style transfer plays a vital role in image manipulation and creates new artistic works in different artistic styles from existing photographs. While style transfer has been widely studied, recovering photo-realistic images from corresponding artistic works has not been fully investigated. And all previous work considers style transfer and removal as separate problems. In this thesis, we present a method to transfer the style of a stylized face to a different face without style and recover photo-realistic face from the same stylized face image simultaneously. Here, style refers to the local patterns or textures of the stylized images. Style transfer gives a new way for artistic creation while style removal can be beneficial for face verification, photo-realistic content editing or facial analysis. Our approach contains two components: the Style Transfer Network (STN) and the Style Removal Network (SRN). STN renders the style of the stylized image to the non-stylized image, and the SRN is designed to remove the style of a stylized photo. By applying the two networks successively to an original input photo, the output should match the input photo. The experiment results in a variety of portraits and styles demonstrate our approach's effectiveness.