Using My Artistic Style? You Must Obtain My Authorization

Xiuli Bi, Haowei Liu, Weisheng Li, Bo Liu*, Bin Xiao ;

"Artistic images typically contain the unique creative styles of artists. However, it is easy to transfer an artist’s style to arbitrary target images using style transfer techniques. To protect styles, some researchers use adversarial attacks to safeguard artists’ artistic style images. Prior methods only considered defending against all style transfer models, but artists may allow specific models to transfer their artistic styles properly. To meet such requirements, we propose an Artistic Style Protection Scheme (ASPS). The scheme utilizes adversarial perturbations to introduce biases in the mean and variance of content and style features extracted by unauthorized models while aligning authorized models’ content and style features. Additionally, it employs pixel-level and feature-level losses to enhance and degrade the output quality of authorized and unauthorized models, respectively. ASPS requires training only once; during usage, there is no need to see any style transfer models again. Meanwhile, it ensures that the visual quality of the authorized model is unaffected by perturbations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively defends against unauthorized models’ indiscriminate use of artistic styles, allowing authorized models to operate normally, thus effectively resolving the issue of controlled authorization regarding artists’ artistic styles. The code is available at https://github.com/CherishL-J/ASPS."