A New Automatic Watercolour Painting Algorithm Based on Dual Stream Image Segmentation Model with Colour Space Estimation

Abstract

Image processing plays a crucial role in automatic watercolor painting by manipulating the digital image to achieve the desired watercolor effect. segmentation in automatic watercolor painting algorithms is essential for region-based processing, color mixing and blending, capturing brushwork and texture, and providing artistic control over the final result. It allows for more realistic and expressive watercolor-like paintings by processing different image regions individually and applying appropriate effects to each segment. Hence, this paper proposed an effective Dual Stream Exception Maximization (DSEM) for automatic image segmentation. DSEM combines both color and texture information to segment an image into meaningful regions. This approach begins by converting the image from the RGB color space to a perceptually-based color space, such as CIELAB, to account for variations in lighting conditions and human perception of color. With the color space conversion, DSEM extracts relevant features from the image. Color features are computed based on the values of the color channels in the chosen color space, capturing the nuances of color distribution within the image. Simultaneously, texture features are derived by computing statistical measures such as local variance or co-occurrence matrices, capturing the textural characteristics of the image. Finally, the model is applied over the deep learning model for the classification of the color space in the painting. Simulation analysis is performed compared with conventional segmentation techniques such a CNN and RNN. The comparative analysis states that the proposed DSEM exhibits superior performance compared to conventional techniques in terms of color space estimation, texture analysis and region merging. The performance of classification with DSEM is ~12% higher than the conventional techniques.