Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics Library

Cubist Style Rendering from Photographs

Author(s): John P. Collomosse, Peter M. Hall.
Article: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 443--453, October, 2003.
[BibTeX]

Abstract:
The contribution of this paper is a novel non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) technique, influenced by the style of Cubist art. Specifically we are motivated by artists such as Picasso and Braque, who produced art work by composing elements of a scene taken from multiple points of view; paradoxically such compositions convey a sense of motion without assuming temporal dependence between views. Our method accepts a set of two-dimensional images as input, and produces a Cubist style painting with minimal user interaction. We use salient features identified within the image set, such as eyes, noses and mouths as compositional elements; we believe the use of such features to be a unique contribution to NPR. Before composing features into a final image we geometrically distort them to produce the more angular forms common in Cubist art. Finally we render the composition to give a painterly effect, using an automatic algorithm. This paper describes our method, illustrating the application of our algorithm with a gallery of images. We conclude with a critical appraisal and suggest the use of "high-level" features is of interest to NPR.