Synthesis and Validation of Virtual Woodcuts Generated with Reaction-Diffusion

Abstract

Although woodcuts are a traditional artistic technique, in which a woodblock is carved and then printed into paper, few works have attempted to synthesize woodcuts in the context of Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR). We previously presented a woodcut synthesis mechanism based on Turing’s reaction-diffusion. In that work, an input image is preprocessed in order to gather information which will be used to control the reaction-diffusion processing. In this article, we expanded our previous work by the addition of noise to improve the appearance of wood and a higher degree of user control toward the final result. We also validated our results by comparison with actual woodcuts and performed a qualitative evaluation with users. This work expands the range of artistic styles which can be generated by NPR tools.