Painterly rendering using image salience

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is a novel non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) technique, capable of producing an artificial 'hand-painted' effect on 2D images, such as photographs. Our method requires no user interaction, and makes use of image salience and gradient information to determine the implicit ordering and attributes of individual brush strokes. The benefits of our technique are complete automation, and mitigation against the loss of image detail during painting. Strokes from lower salience regions of the image do not encroach upon higher salience regions; this can occur with some existing painting methods. We describe our algorithm in detail, and illustrate its application with a gallery of images.