Neural map style transfer exploration with GANs

ABSTRACT Neural Style Transfer is a Computer Vision topic intending to transfer the visual appearance or the style of images to other images. Developments in deep learning nicely generate stylized images from texture-based examples or transfer the style of a photograph to another one. In map design, the style is a multi-dimensional complex problem related to recognizable visual salient features and topological arrangements, supporting the description of geographic spaces at a specific scale. The map style transfer is still at stake to generate a diversity of possible new styles to render geographical features. Generative adversarial Networks (GANs) techniques, well supporting image-to-image translation tasks, offer new perspectives for map style transfer. We propose to use accessible GAN architectures, in order to experiment and assess neural map style transfer to ortho-images, while using different map designs of various geographic spaces, from simple-styled (Plan maps) to complex-styled (old Cassini, Etat-Major, or Scan50 B&W). This transfer task and our global protocol are presented, including the sampling grid, the training and test of Pix2Pix and CycleGAN models, such as the perceptual assessment of the generated outputs. Promising results are discussed, opening research issues for neural map style transfer exploration with GANs.