title: Efficient example-based painting and synthesis of 2D directional texture.
abstract: We present a new method for converting a photo or image to a synthesized painting following the painting style of an example painting. Treating painting styles of brush strokes as sample textures, we reduce the problem of learning an example painting to a texture synthesis problem. The proposed method uses a hierarchical patch-based approach to the synthesis of directional textures. The key features of our method are: 1) Painting styles are represented as one or more blocks of sample textures selected by the user from the example painting; 2) image segmentation and brush stroke directions defined by the medial axis are used to better represent and communicate shapes and objects present in the synthesized painting; 3) image masks and a hierarchy of texture patches are used to efficiently synthesize high-quality directional textures. The synthesis process is further accelerated through texture direction quantization and the use of Gaussian pyramids. Our method has the following advantages: First, the synthesized stroke textures can follow a direction field determined by the shapes of regions to be painted. Second, the method is very efficient; the generation time of a synthesized painting ranges from a few seconds to about one minute, rather than hours, as required by other existing methods, on a commodity PC. Furthermore, the technique presented here provides a new and efficient solution to the problem of synthesizing a 2D directional texture. We use a number of test examples to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and the high quality of results produced by the method.
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. bwang@csis.hku.hk
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Wenping
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Huaiping
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Jiaguang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sun
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010151:Paintings; D010781:Photography / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014584:User-Computer Interface