Efficient Example-Based Painting and Synthesis of 2D Directional Texture
Author(s): Bin Wang, Wenping Wang, Huaiping Yang, Jiaguang Sun.
Article: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 266--277,
2004.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
We present a new method for converting a photo or image to a synthesized painting following the painting style of an example painting. Treating painting styles of brush strokes as sample textures, we reduce the problem of learning an example painting to a texture synthesis problem. The proposed method uses a hierarchical patch-based approach to the synthesis of directional textures. The key features of our method are: 1) Painting styles are represented as one or more blocks of sample textures selected by the user from the example painting; 2) image segmentation and brush stroke directions defined by the medial axis are used to better
represent and communicate shapes and objects present in the synthesized painting; 3) image masks and a hierarchy of texture
patches are used to efficiently synthesize high-quality directional textures. The synthesis process is further accelerated through texture
direction quantization and the use of Gaussian pyramids. Our method has the following advantages: First, the synthesized stroke
textures can follow a direction field determined by the shapes of regions to be painted. Second, the method is very efficient; the
generation time of a synthesized painting ranges from a few seconds to about one minute, rather than hours, as required by other
existing methods, on a commodity PC. Furthermore, the technique presented here provides a new and efficient solution to the problem
of synthesizing a 2D directional texture. We use a number of test examples to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method and
the high quality of results produced by the method.