I’ve made some significant headway in my sketch filter development thus far, and I don’t think it’ll do any harm to share some information regarding my progress.
I’ve developed a trainable model for image manipulation, targeted for speed and accuracy for this particular sketch filter transformation. I also went ahead and set up an experiment to run to compare my model architecture with itself in a few forms, and with a more basic residual-based architecture in a few forms, each trained to fit for three different types of image transformations. Thus far, results demonstrate my model architecture’s superiority in terms of accuracy per training epoch. It’ll take some time to complete the experiment run, and it is costly in terms of hardware time to complete, so I find this goal competing with actual development, both of new filters and the sketch filter.
For the sketch filter itself, I’ve optimized and retrained it severally, some of the results of which I’ve posted here. The filter is now fully compatible with and exportable to tensorflow-lite, and I’ve gone ahead and implemented a simple android phone app which takes pictures, feeds them to the filter, and saves the result on my phone. This is some distance from being a marketable app but it serves as a handy proof of concept, and is a great tool for testing the filter on arbitrary images.
On a side note, this app has been my first exposure to kotlin. I wonder about the choice by Android to migrate to a different programming language (it used to be java), and the choice to pick something that is new rather than another established language. I suppose it is to do with the fading of Java as a language. Android sort of inherited it, as they are by far the most significant user, and if they want to morph it to something else, that is their call. They’ve made the transition pretty painless, with Kotlin’s inherent compatibility with Java, and great automatic refactoring built into Android Studio.
Having been working exclusively with python of late, using text editors, I totally forgot how helpful a good IDE like Android Studio can be. It’s not like you don’t still need to review the sdk documentation, frequently, but the completion suggestions and realtime error detection really reduce syntax compliance annoyances.
