Assessing arbitrary style transfer like an artist

Arbitrary style transfer (AST) is a distinctive technique for transferring artistic style into content images, with the goal of generating stylized images that approximates real artistic paintings. Thus, it is natural to develop a quantitative evaluation metric to act like an artist for accurately assessing the quality of AST images. Inspired by this, we present an artist-like network (AL-Net) which can analyze the quality of the stylized images like an artist from the fine knowledge of artistic painting (e.g., aesthetics, structure, color, texture). Specifically, the AL-Net consists of three sub-networks: an aesthetic prediction network (AP-Net), a content preservation prediction network (CPP-Net), and a style resemblance prediction network (SRP-Net), which can be regarded as specialized feature extractors, leveraging professional artistic painting knowledge through pre-training by different labels. To more effectively predict the final overall quality, we apply transfer learning to integrate the pre-trained feature vectors representing different painting elements into overall vision quality regression. The loss determined by the overall vision label fine-tunes the parameters of AL-Net, and thus our model can establish a tight connection with human perception. Extensive experiments on the AST-IQAD dataset validate that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.