Synthesis of oil-style paintings

Abstract

Non-photorealistic rendering is an important research topic in computer graphics, where painterly (or stroke-based) rendering has received intensive attention from researchers in recent years. The goal of this paper is to design a fully automatic algorithm, which is able to turn a photograph into an oil-style painting. Different from the existing approaches that use real brush stroke images as templates, our brush strokes were created in random manner according to the characteristics of the local image region. For determining the direction of a brush stroke, we also proposed a new method based on template-matching to evaluate the major orientation of edge features within a local image window. Moreover, a novel method of deciding stroke locations was proposed, which is simple yet effective. All these features together significantly reduce the undesirable systematic impression, which appears to be a common artifact of painterly rendering.