JapanTokyoStartups Sakana AI It brings two new image generation models - Evo-Ukiyoe and Evo-Nishikie.
Image from Sakana AI Official
The two models can be found on the Hugging Face platform. Their main purpose is to generate Ukiyo-e style artworks through text or image prompts. As we all know, Ukiyo-e is a traditional art form popular in Japan from the 17th to the 19th century, depicting many themes such as historical scenes, natural scenery and sumo wrestlers. Sakana AI hopes to use the power of AI to bring this ancient art form back to the vision of modern people.
The Evo-Ukiyoe model is primarily a text-to-image generation tool that can generate images similar to Ukiyoe. For example, when you input some descriptions about cherry blossoms, kimonos, or birds, it will generate works that match these elements. Even modern elements such as hamburgers or laptops can be converted into Ukiyoe-style images by it, of course, sometimes the results may be off topic.
The model is based on Sakana's own Evo-SDXL-JP, which has been fine-tuned and uses a dataset of more than 24,000 Ukiyo-e artworks. These works were obtained through a collaboration with the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, ensuring the diversity and high quality of the data.
Another model, Evo-Nishikie, is an image-to-image processing tool that can add color to a monochrome Ukiyo-e painting or re-style an existing multi-color work. Users only need to provide the source image and attach the color requirements, and the model will do the rest.
Sakana AI said that their goal is to promote the understanding of traditional "Japanese beauty" through these two models, and hope to find new applications in education and cultural communication. Although the two models currently only support Japanese prompts, they are constantly developing and there will be more possibilities in the future.
Currently, Sakana AI has made these two models and related codes available on Hugging Face for research and development use, but it should be noted that they are still in the experimental stage and are not suitable for commercial use.
Product entrance: https://huggingface.co/SakanaAI/Evo-Ukiyoe-v1
Official blog: https://sakana.ai/evo-ukiyoe/