Justin Johnson's Neural Style Torch Implementation Explained

If you have found yourself scratching your head trying to understand the torch implementation of the paper "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, and Matthias Bethge written by Justin Johnson in github, help is on the way in the form of the following technical note:

Justin Johnson's Neural Style Torch Implementation Explained

It assumes you have read (a few times) either "A neural algorithm of artistic style" by Gatys, Leon A and Ecker, Alexander S and Bethge, Matthias or "Image style transfer using convolutional neural networks" by Gatys, Leon A and Ecker, Alexander S and Bethge, Matthias. Note that the latter is actually the better paper.

By the way, here is an example of what Neural Style can do to transfer the texture from style image to content image:

This is the content image.

This is the style image.

This is the generated image.

Note that I am mostly interested in texture transfer without color transfer, in other words, I always want the colors of the content image to remain. The only thing that I want to be transferred is the texture of the style image. This is personal preference as I really like to see the brush strokes.