Image Warping for a Painterly Effect

Abstract

We propose a two-stage approach to painterly rendering of photographs, where the image plane is first warped to produce a distorted or caricatured effect and then the resulting image is rendered with a painterly effect. We use SLIC superpixels to obtain an oversegmentation, and assign spring parameters uniformly to all pixels within a region; then, the mass-spring simulation distorts the plane in a random but content-sensitive way. With aggressive warping, the subsequent painterly rendering can be done lightly and need not remove much detail. The resulting renderings convey a sense of being painted and leave a sense of being handmade and not overly beholden to the photographic scene.