Sisley the abstract painter

Mingtian Zhao, Song-Chun Zhu
2010 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering - NPAR 10  
Photograph ( H ≈ 0) Painting A ( H ≈ 0.25) Painting B ( H ≈ 0.5) Painting C ( H ≈ 0.75) Figure 1: Sisley renders a photograph (courtesy of pdphoto.org) into three abstract paintings at different perceptual ambiguity levels. Abstract We present an interactive abstract painting system named Sisley. Sisley works upon the psychological principle [Berlyne 1971 ] that abstract arts are often characterized by their greater perceptual ambiguities than photographs, which tend to invoke moderate mental
more » ... forts of the audience for interpretation, accompanied with subtle aesthetic pleasures. Given an input photograph, Sisley decomposes it into a hierarchy/tree of its constituent image components (e.g., regions, objects of different categories) with interactive guidance from the user, then automatically generates corresponding abstract painting images, with increased ambiguities of both the scene and individual objects at desired levels. Sisley consists of three major working parts: (1) an interactive image parser executing the tasks of segmentation, labeling, and hierarchical organization, (2) a painterly rendering engine with abstract operators for transferring the image appearance, and (3) a numerical ambiguity computation and control module of servomechanism. With the help of Sisley, even an amateur user can create abstract paintings from photographs easily in minutes. We have evaluated the rendering results of Sisley using human experiments, and verified that they have similar abstract effects to original abstract paintings by artists.
doi:10.1145/1809939.1809951 dblp:conf/npar/ZhaoZ10 fatcat:efug3sk5gjeq3ler2rwlzwddyq