German researchers from the University of Tubingen have devised an algorithm that analyzes a painting and then applies that style of painting to any desired picture. The results were recently published in a paper entitled, A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker and Matthias Bethge, and the results are simply spectacular:

Image via Andrej Karpathy on Twitter.

“In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images.”

Image via Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge

You can read the entire paper for free here.