  There have been many successful implementations of neural style transfer in
recent years. In most of these works, the stylization process is confined to
the pixel domain. However, we argue that this representation is unnatural
because paintings usually consist of brushstrokes rather than pixels. We
propose a method to stylize images by optimizing parameterized brushstrokes
instead of pixels and further introduce a simple differentiable rendering
mechanism. Our approach significantly improves visual quality and enables
additional control over the stylization process such as controlling the flow of
brushstrokes through user input. We provide qualitative and quantitative
evaluations that show the efficacy of the proposed parameterized
representation.
