This AI Turns Simple Sketches Into Van Gogh Paintings

Cambridge Consultants has demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that takes simple sketches and transforms them into artwork that look like something created by Vincent Van Gogh or other famous painters. The system, which is nicknamed Vincent for obvious reasons, serves as a deep-learning demonstration for the company, which recently showcased the AI's abilities on video.

The system uses machine learning to understand artwork produced by famous painters since the renaissance, among them being Picasso and Van Gogh. Using this knowledge that it acquires, the system can take a sketch created by a human and apply art effects to it in an intelligent way, the end result being a colorful 'painting' that looks like something created by a skilled human.

Cambridge Consultants explains that it trained its AI with images of thousands of paintings, helping it learn things like contrast, textures, and color application. This was accomplished using multiple machine learning approaches, the company explains, making it unique compared to early deep learning tech.

Talking about this, the company's director of machine learning Monty Barlow said:

What we've built would have been unthinkable to the original deep learning pioneers. By successfully combining different machine learning approaches, such as adversarial training, perceptual loss, and end-to-end training of stacked networks, we've created something hugely interactive, taking the germ of a sketched idea and allowing the history of human art to run with it.

This isn't the only AI we've seen that can do great things to simple sketches, and some of them are available for the public to use. There is, for example, this pix2pix project that allows users to sketch a simple person in their browser, then have the AI process it into something that resembles a living creature.

SOURCE: Cambridge Consultants