Famous author and artist Eric Carle turns 91 today. I remember loving his books when I was a kid, especially The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Each book features his distinctive art style. The images are collages composed of tissue paper and acrylic paint, producing vivid depictions of animals and nature.

THE PROBLEM

Carle’s work is as complex as it is beautiful. How can we make it easier for children to produce their own homages to his creations?

THE SOLUTION

Neural style transfer is a technique that allows you to compose images in another’s style using deep learning. That is, you teach a computer to identify key elements of an image’s style and redraw that image in that style it has just learned.

I found this excellent Google Colab notebook which taught me all about how to do this with tf.Keras!

Taking the code from the tutorial I built a website that lets you upload images, have the style of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar transferred to it, and display it for the world to see and for you to download! At any given time the latest 10 images will be displayed for any visitors to see. The website is built in one of my favorite frameworks, Flask.

You can access the website at ericcarletransfer.ml. Be warned, the transfer time can be in excess of 10 minutes- it is very computationally intensive.

The results have been encouraging though! Take a look:

The neural network is picking up on the look of the tissue paper and paint. In the future I want to work on reducing the amount of noise seen in the backgrounds.

SHARING THE SOLUTION

The URL again is http://ericcarlearttransfer.ml/

As always, the entire project is opens source and can be found here on GitHub!