Becasso

Abstract

BeCasso is a mobile app that enables users to transform photos into high-quality, high-resolution non-photorealistic renditions, such as oil and watercolor paintings, cartoons, and colored pencil drawings, which are inspired by real-world paintings or drawing techniques. In contrast to neuronal network and physically-based approaches, the app employs state-of-the-art nonlinear image filtering. For example, oil paint and cartoon effects are based on smoothed structure information to interactively synthesize renderings with soft color transitions. BeCasso empowers users to easily create aesthetic renderings by implementing a two-fold strategy: First, it provides parameter presets that may serve as a starting point for a custom stylization based on global parameter adjustments. Thereby, users can obtain initial renditions that may be fine-tuned afterwards. Second, it enables local style adjustments: using on-screen painting metaphors, users are able to locally adjust different stylization features, e.g., to vary the level of abstraction, pen, brush and stroke direction or the contour lines. In this way, the app provides tools for both higher-level interaction and low-level control [Isenberg 2016] to serve the different needs of non-experts and digital artists.