Sand painting conversion based on detail preservation

Abstract

Sand painting is a significant form of artistic expression. It is necessary to convert real photographs into sand painting style automatically. However, current methods for creating artwork mostly concentrate on oil painting, watercolor painting, and other fields, with little involvement in sand painting. In this paper, we propose a sand painting conversion algorithm that aims to create a unique art style while preserving details. Our Sand Painting Conversion (SPC) method consists of two primary processes: coarse waving for the whole image and detail preservation for specific parts. The former process involves parameter optimization to render the entire image and obtain preliminary sand painting results. The latter process comprises three parts: detail painting based on sand reduction, refined waving for inhomogeneous areas, and edge detail processing based on multi-technique selection, in order to achieve detail preservation from a source image to the sand painting style. Our SPC can generate a series of realistic sand painting works without any user intervention. Comparative experiments and user feedback have revealed the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm in converting natural images into high-quality and realistic sand painting style images.