A study of neural artistic style transfer models and architectures for Indian art styles

Neural Style Transfer (NST) has been a widely researched topic as of late enabling new forms of image manipulation. Here we perform an extensive study on NST algorithms and extend the existing methods with custom modifications for application to Indian art styles. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of various methods ranging from the seminal work of Gatys et al which demonstrated the power of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in creating artistic imagery by separating and recombining image content and style, to the state of the art image-to-image translation models which use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to learn the mapping between two domain of images. We observe and infer based on the results produced by the models on which one could be a more suitable approach for Indian art styles, especially Tanjore paintings which are unique compared to the Western art styles. We then propose the method which is more suitable for the domain of Indian Art style along with custom architecture which includes an enhancement and evaluation module. We then present evaluation methods, both qualitative and quantitative which includes our proposed metric, to evaluate the results produced by the model.

Neural Style Transfer as Data Augmentation for Improving COVID-19 Diagnosis Classification

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has accounted for millions of causalities. While it affects not only individuals but also our collective healthcare and economic systems, testing is insufficient and costly hampering efforts to deal with the pandemic. Chest X-rays are routine radiographic imaging tests that are used for the diagnosis of respiratory conditions such as pneumonia and COVID-19. Convolutional neural networks have shown promise to be effective at classifying X-rays for assisting diagnosis of conditions; however, achieving robust performance demanded in most modern medical applications typically requires a large number of samples. While there exist datasets containing thousands of X-ray images of patients with healthy and pneumonia diagnoses, because COVID-19 is such a recent phenomenon, there are relatively few confirmed COVID-19 positive chest X-rays openly available to the research community. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of cycle-generative adversarial network, commonly used for neural style transfer, as a way to augment COVID-19 negative X-ray images to look like COVID-19 positive images for increasing the number of COVID-19 positive training samples. The statistical results show an increase in the mean macro f1-score over 21% on a one-tailed t score = 2.68 and p value = 0.01 to accept our alternative hypothesis for an α = 0.05 . We conclude that this approach, when used in conjunction with standard transfer learning techniques, is effective at improving the performance of COVID-19 classifiers for a variety of common convolutional neural networks.