Prisma, the app for adding filters has been drawing attention from around since the time it was launched in July 2016.
The popularity and success of the app were followed by the creation of an ocean of similarly cloned apps which tried to implement the concept of the original Prisma app. Just recently, Facebook had joined the list of the companies that were trying to emulate the style transfer technology from Prisma to its own products. Now, Google has revealed its plans of launching its own style transfer technology to take the competition to an entirely different level. The new photo-manipulation tool from Google will not just allow the users to convert their selfies into beautiful pieces of art, but will also them in doing so by creating their own unique filters by combining different styles, all of which can be done in real-time.
About the Style Transfer App
Apart from just applying the filters to videos, the style transfer technology from Google also allows the users to create their own filters by blending in different filters. Similar to the technology used for the Facebook’s style transfer, even the Google’s style transfer technology shows the results in real-time to the users. Google has described its technology as a simple method that allows a style transfer which is a single deep convolutional network which lets the user learn and apply multiple styles at the same time. According to the tech giant, multiple styles can be combined, the resulting style of which can be applied by using just a single style transfer network, all in real-time.
The users are provided with almost 13 different painting styles, the respective strengths of which can be adjusted to the final style by taking help of sliders. The app allows the user to adjust the different styles until the desired result is reached in real-time. Though blending of different styles is undoubtedly a very demanding task, the company has reportedly said that the technology it uses is very simple to be implemented by the users and is not intensive on the memory either. The style transfer network uses artificial intelligence in order to apply filters to the app.
Google had mentioned in its official blog post that unlike the previous approaches to the style transfer technique, this method of blending in multiple styles at the same time is highly efficient and should open the doors to many exciting new ways for the users to interact with the style transfer algorithm which not only allows the freedom of creating new styles that are based on a mixture of several other styles but also allows it to do it in real-time. The app provides the users with many options to showcase their creativity and allows them to create their own pieces of art by using the styles of famous paintings.
Prisma and Google are not the only tech-based companies that are working on the style transfer technologies. Facebook had recently announced that the company is working towards crafting its own art filters that can be applied to live videos. However, it is not yet clear when the new style transfer feature will be rolled out by Facebook.
The filter technology still seems to be in the developmental stages and Google has not yet made any announcement regarding when the company plans on releasing this new technology. The company has made further promises that the system’s TensorFlow source code will be made available to the users so that they can run the app and test it themselves.