Frame Difference-Based Temporal Loss for Video Stylization

Neural style transfer models have been used to stylize an ordinary video to specific styles. To ensure temporal inconsistency between the frames of the stylized video, a common approach is to estimate the optic flow of the pixels in the original video and make the generated pixels match the estimated optical flow. This is achieved by minimizing an optical flow-based (OFB) loss during model training. However, optical flow estimation is itself a challenging task, particularly in complex scenes. In addition, it incurs a high computational cost. We propose a much simpler temporal loss called the frame difference-based (FDB) loss to solve the temporal inconsistency problem. It is defined as the distance between the difference between the stylized frames and the difference between the original frames. The differences between the two frames are measured in both the pixel space and the feature space specified by the convolutional neural networks. A set of human behavior experiments involving 62 subjects with 25,600 votes showed that the performance of the proposed FDB loss matched that of the OFB loss. The performance was measured by subjective evaluation of stability and stylization quality of the generated videos on two typical video stylization models. The results suggest that the proposed FDB loss is a strong alternative to the commonly used OFB loss for video stylization.