Fast Techniques for Non Photorealistic Rendering
Author(s): G. Di Blasi.
PhD Thesis: University of Catania, Italy,
2006.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
This thesis investigates the problem of producing nonphotorealistic digital images especially for aesthetic purposes; this research field has not an "official" name yet within the larger realm of Computer Science, some people call it Artistic Rendering (AR), [Col04], some others, Computational Aesthetics (CA), [Com06], someone else NonPhotorealistic Rendering (NPR). In this thesis I prefer the term "Computational Aesthetics" because I think that this term better explains the "essence", the purpose and the aim of this field: to reproduce the aesthetic essence of human arts by mean of computational tools. Specifically, I address the problem of mosaics rendering, proposing novel algorithms for fast mosaics creation starting from real images. In this thesis I present several methods (together with many improvements) to transform a raster input image into good quality mosaics: artificial (or ancient) mosaics, photomosaics and puzzle image mosaics. The main goal of all methods is to produce good results in an acceptable time and without (or with a minimal) user intervention. Examples reported in this thesis show how the right mixture of mathematical and computational tools may lead to impressive aesthetic results.