Convolution Neural Networks With Two Pathways for Image Style Recognition

Automatic recognition of an image’s style is important for many applications, including artwork analysis, photo organization, and image retrieval. Traditional convolution neural network (CNN) approach uses only object features for image style recognition. This approach may not be optimal, because the same object in two images may have different styles. We propose a CNN architecture with two pathways extracting object features and texture features, respectively. The object pathway represents the standard CNN architecture and the texture pathway intermixes the object pathway by outputting the gram matrices of intermediate features in the object pathway. The two pathways are jointly trained. In experiments, two deep CNNs, AlexNet and VGG-19, pretrained on the ImageNet classification data set are fine-tuned for this task. For any model, the two-pathway architecture performs much better than individual pathways, which indicates that the two pathways contain complementary information of an image’s style. In particular, the model based on VGG-19 achieves the state-of-the-art results on three benchmark data sets, WikiPaintings, Flickr Style, and AVA Style.