Song, Yi-ZheRosin, Paul L.Hall, Peter M.Collomosse, JohnDouglas W. Cunningham and Victoria Interrante and Paul Brown and Jon McCormack2013-10-222013-10-222008978-3-905674-08-81816-0859http://dx.doi.org/10.2312/COMPAESTH/COMPAESTH08/065-072This paper shows that shape simplification is a tool useful in Non-Photorealistic rendering from photographs, because it permits a level of abstraction otherwise unreachable. A variety of simple shapes (e.g. circles, triangles, squares, superellipses and so on) are optimally fitted to each region within a segmented photograph. The system automatically chooses the shape that best represents the region; the choice is made via a supervised classifier so the 'best shape' depends on the subjectivity of a user. The whole process is fully automatic, aside from the setting of two user variables to control the number of regions in a pair of segmentations - and even these can be left fixed for many images. A gallery of results shows how this work reaches towards the art of later Matisse, of Kandinsky, and other artists who favored shape simplification in their paintings.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.4 [Graphics Utilities]: Paint systems