This article was published on August 13, 2021

This AI turns your photos into paintings while you watch

Virtual brushstrokes bring the painting to life


This AI turns your photos into paintings while you watch

I sometimes fantasize about hanging an enormous painted portrait of yours truly on my bedroom wall. Visitors would be forced to genuflect before the picture and leave a gift beneath it as a token of respect.

Unfortunately, I have neither the money to buy artworks nor the skills to paint one myself. But those barriers will no longer stop me from fulfilling my dream.

A team of researchers has developed a tool that will paint your portrait for you.

Dubbed Paint Transformer, the system predicts the parameters of a stroke set with a feed-forward network.

“This way, our model can generate a set of strokes in parallel and obtain the final painting of size 512 × 512 in near real-time,” the researchers wrote in their study paper.

The AI turns photos into paintings.
The system can recreate a wide range of photos.

There are already plenty of AI tools that turn photos into artworks, but this one has a unique style that could surely grace Le Louvre.

You can also watch the artificial brushstrokes bring the painting to life.

This is AI artistry that even a former president turned self-obsessed party animal could proudly hang on his wall.

You can try the tool out for yourself here and read the pre-print study paper on  arXiv.

This story is adapted from the Neural newsletter. You can subscribe to it right here.

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