Applying Anime Style Filters With Python

Introduction

Hello! 😃
In this tutorial I will show you how to use AnimeGAN2 models to apply various filters to an input image using PyTorch. The AnimeGAN2 is a generative adversarial network (GAN) based model that can generate anime-style images from real-word images. We will be using the "bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch" package, which provides pre-trained AnimeGAN2 models for different styles of anime filters.

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Requirements

It would be recommended to have the following before proceeding with this tutorial:

• Basic knowledge of Python
• Some familiarity with PyTorch and neural networks

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Setting Up The Virtual Environment

First it's recommended to set up a virtual environment, this can be created via the following command:

python3 -m venv env

And then activated via:

source env/bin/activate

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Installing The Dependencies

Next we need to install the dependencies, create a file called "requirements.txt" and populate it with the following:

torchvision
torch
Pillow

To install the dependencies, run the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Done! Now we can actually start coding. 😆

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Coding The Project

Create a file called "main.py", first we need to declare the imports and load the pre-trained AnimeGAN2 models like so:

from PIL import Image
import torch
import argparse

MODEL_CELEBA = torch.hub.load("bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch:main", "generator", pretrained="celeba_distill")
MODEL_FACEV1 = torch.hub.load("bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch:main", "generator", pretrained="face_paint_512_v1")
MODEL_FACEV2 = torch.hub.load("bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch:main", "generator", pretrained="face_paint_512_v2")
MODEL_PAPRIKA = torch.hub.load("bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch:main", "generator", pretrained="paprika")

FACE2PAINT = torch.hub.load("bryandlee/animegan2-pytorch:main", "face2paint", size=512)

In the above code we use the torch.hub.load method to download the pre-trained AnimeGAN2 models for different styles of anime filters. We also load the "FACE2PAINT" model that can convert a real world image into a painting style. We wil use these models to apply filters to the input image. 😺

Next we will define a method to apply the filters to the image:

def applyFilters(image):
    out_celeba = FACE2PAINT(MODEL_CELEBA, image)
    out_facev1 = FACE2PAINT(MODEL_FACEV1, image)
    out_facev2 = FACE2PAINT(MODEL_FACEV2, image)
    out_paprika = FACE2PAINT(MODEL_PAPRIKA, image)

    # save images
    out_celeba.save("out_celeba.jpg")
    out_facev1.save("out_facev1.jpg")
    out_facev2.save("out_facev2.jpg")
    out_paprika.save("out_paprika.jpg")

The above method takes an Image object as input and produces their output images.

The final method is the main method which is as follows:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    ap = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    ap.add_argument("-i", "--image", required = True, help = "Path to input file")
    args = vars(ap.parse_args())

    image = Image.open(args["image"]).convert("RGB")
    applyFilters(image)
    print("Done!")

The above method uses the argparse module to parse an "image" command line argument, this allows the user to provide an input file to provide filters to.

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Running The Script

To run the script you can use the following command:

python main.py -i input.jpg

Replace the input.jpg with the image you want to provide filters to. If done correct you should now see 4 new images in the current directory.  🤓

It not only works with people, it also works with animals here is my cat with the filters. 😸

Celeba:

FaceV1:

FaceV2:

Paprika:

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Conclusion

In this tutorial I showed how to apply varous anime style filters to an input image. I was actually surprised you could do this in with this little amount of code. 😮 But I had a lot of fun trying this out. Hopefully it's been helpful to you and I hope you try it out with various images.

Happy Coding! 😁

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