Semantic-Aware Video Style Transfer Based on Temporal Consistent Sparse Patch Constraint

This paper proposes a practical style transfer method to synthesize a temporally smooth video whose style information is semantically consistent with the reference video. Due to the lack of paired videos for training, we extend the structure of CycleGAN with sparse patch and temporal constraints, including a new semantic patch loss and a novel temporal loss. Our approach’s key insights are: (1) the semantically paired sparse patches chosen from synthesized videos and reference frames would promote the semantic meaning of style transfer, the preservation of video content, and the smoothness of results by minimizing the discrepancies between these paired patches. (2) the forward and backward temporal consistency among neighbouring frames can reduce the discontinuity in the synthesized video. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on various metrics demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art strategies.