figure - left imagethe original photograph depicting the neckarfront in tubingengermany right imagethe painting (insetthe starry night by vincent van goghthat provided the style for the respective generated image sourcea neural algorithm of artistic stylegatys et al (arxiv: the results in figure - showcase how painting' (van gogh' the starry nightstyle has been transferred to photograph of the neckarfront at first glancethe process seems to have picked up the content from the photographthe stylecolorsand stroke patterns from the painting and generated the final outcome the results are amazingbut what is more surprising ishow was it donefigure - showcases process termed as artistic style transfer the process is an outcome of research by gatys et al and is presented in their paper neural algorithm for artistic style in this sectionwe discuss the intricacies of this paper from an implementation point of view and see how we can perform this technique ourselves ##note prisma is an app that transforms photos into works of art using techniques of artistic style transfer based on convolution neural networks more about the app is available at background formallyneural style transfer is the process of applying the "styleof reference image to specific target image such that in the processthe original "contentof the target image remains unchanged herestyle is defined as colorspatternsand textures present in the reference imagewhile content is defined as the overall structure and higher-level components of the image the main objective here is thento retain the content of the original target imagewhile superimposing or adopting the style of the reference image on the target image to define this concept mathematicallyconsider three images--the original content (denoted as )the reference style (denoted as )and the generated image (denoted as gthuswe need way to measure how different are images and in terms of their content function that tends to if and are completely different and grows otherwise this can be concisely stated in terms of loss function aslcontent distance(cgwhere distance is norm function like on the same lineswe can define another function that captures how different images and are in terms of their style in other wordsthis can be stated as followslstyle distance(sg