Li, HuaMould, DavidStam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, Kun2015-10-072015-10-072015https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12770This paper investigates contrast enhancement as an approach to tone reduction, aiming to convert a photograph to black and white. Using a filter-based approach to strengthen contrast, we avoid making a hard decision about how to assign tones to segmented regions. Our method is inspired by sticks filtering, used to enhance medical images but not previously used in non-photorealistic rendering. We amplify contrast of pixels along the direction of greatest local difference from the mean, strengthening even weak features if they are most prominent. A final thresholding step converts the contrast-enhanced image to black and white. Local smoothing and contrast enhancement balances abstraction and structure preservation; the main advantage of our method is its faithful depiction of image detail. Our method can create a set of effects: line drawing, hatching, and black and white, all having superior details to previous black and white methods.I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]Picture/Image GenerationLine and curve generation10.1111/cgf.12770319-328