Photo Filters Are About To Get Amazing

Van Gogh: eat your heart out. AI has finally figured out a way to make any regular photograph look like a work of art.

Researchers at the University of Tubingen, Germany, have created a neural network that analyses images piece by piece rather than as one whole chunk of data. So if you give it a photo of a street (as above), it will pick out the colours and shapes as well as objects it can recognise like ‘house’ and ‘tree’.

Because it looks at the actual content of the image separately from the style it is rendered in, the system can intelligently manipulate both elements independently - so your humble photo of a street can be transformed into a work of art in the style of Van Gogh.

Or Munch. Or Picasso.

Which beats the Instagram overlays we’re used to.

That’s not all. There is some suggestion that the system can go beyond the image - by feeding it the right information, the same basic system could be used to design buildings, clothes and even music.

Images: Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge