Computer Vision-based Style Transfer techniques have been used for many years to represent artistic style. However, most contemporary methods have been restricted to the pixel domain; in other words, the style transfer approach has been modifying the image pixels to incorporate artistic style. However, real artistic work is made of brush strokes with different colors on a canvas. Pixel-based approaches are unnatural for representing these images. Hence, this paper discusses a style transfer method that represents the image in the brush stroke domain instead of the RGB domain, which has better visual improvement over pixel-based methods.
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Figure 1: B represents the output of Gatys’ style transfer method, while C is the result of our proposed approach. Visually, our method produces an image that more closely resembles artistic brush strokes compared to Gatys’. D is the output after pixel optimization, where the brush strokes are blended, resulting in a more cohesive and refined representation.
Figure 2: The top row shows the results of Gatys’ style transfer approach, while the bottom row displays the output of the proposed method. In our approach, parameterized brush strokes are passed through a differentiable renderer, which maps them onto the canvas. The content and style losses are then calculated, and gradients are backpropagated through the renderer to optimize the brush strokes. The image is taken from [ 8 ]
Figure 3: Zoomed view of brush strokes with pixel optimization.
Figure 4: Style transfer applied to a human image.
The style of a painting is not monolithic: color, texture, and structure may come from different sources. Existing reference-guided methods transfer them as one style signal, leaving each attribute's source and strength outside the user's control. We ask where in a diffusion model one attribute can change while the others hold, and find that no single representation isolates all three. The proposed StyleComposer therefore routes each style attribute through the representation where it separates best and coordinates the routes over denoising time. Without training or inversion, it satisfies three references and the prompt jointly more closely than prior methods, and exposes one strength slider per attribute. Project page: https://lexxsh.github.io/StyleComposer
Many creative multimedia systems are built upon visual primitives such as strokes or textures, which are difficult to collect at scale and fundamentally different from natural image data. This data scarcity makes it challenging for modern generative models to learn expressive and controllable primitives, limiting their use in process-aware content creation. In this work, we study the problem of learning human-like brushstroke generation from a small set of hand-drawn samples (n=470) and propose StrokeDiff, a diffusion-based framework with Smooth Regularization (SmR). SmR injects stochastic visual priors during training, providing a simple mechanism to stabilize diffusion models under sparse supervision without altering the inference process. We further show how the learned primitives can be made controllable through a Bézier-based conditioning module and integrated into a complete stroke-based painting pipeline, including prediction, generation, ordering, and compositing. This demonstrates how data-efficient primitive modeling can support expressive and structured multimedia content creation. Experiments indicate that the proposed approach produces diverse and structurally coherent brushstrokes and enables paintings with richer texture and layering, validated by both automatic metrics and human evaluation.
Dantong Qin, Alessandro Bozzon, Xian Yang +3
Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands · The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, HKSAR
Photorealistic style transfer aims to match the color and tone of an input image to that of a style target while preserving the content and details of the original scene. Although existing large image models can facilitate these kinds of appearance edits, their high computational demands, potential for hallucinations, and limited user control make them unsuitable for high-resolution, real-time workflows. We introduce Hist2Style, a bilateral-grid formulation for fast, edge-aware stylization that preserves visual fidelity by constraining operations to locally affine transforms in bilateral space. Our model distills a large image editing model into a lightweight network by training on a large supervised corpus generated with language and vision-language models, targeting spatially varying color edits. The network conditions on a histogram-based embedding of the style target to provide an interpretable interface for adjusting the output style by modifying the target color distribution. Overall, Hist2Style maintains content structure by construction, avoids hallucinations, and supports real-time, high-resolution photorealistic stylization with interactive user-controllable color and tone adjustments.
Dekel Galor, Adam Pikielny, Zhoutong Zhang +4
Adobe Nextcam · University of California, Berkeley