Creating Watercolor Style Images Taking Into Account Painting Techniques

Abstract

Research for creating impressive images like paintings has attained more and more importance because of the recent growth in processing images. Among many painting styles, watercolor style gives a strong impression because of its thin colors and its soft appearance. This paper proposes a method to create watercolor style images from input images, for instance photographs. In contrast with the previously proposed watercolor methods that focuses only on simulating the effects of watercolor medium such as the mottled appearance and the color glazing, the proposed method also considers how the watercolor paintings are painted in order to simulate artists′ painting techniques. In the proposed method, artists′ painting techniques are represented using painting rules. Several painting rules are provided, in addition, user can specify their own painting rules. These painting rules are used for generating strokes to paint the objects. Painting techniques are simulated by first detecting the objects in the input image and generating strokes for each object according to the painting rules. The properties of watercolor medium are simulated by approximating each stroke with sampling points and diffuses their color to nearby pixels. Using the proposed method, a user can interactively create watercolor style images.