An interactive system for low-poly illustration generation from images using adaptive thinning

Abstract

Low-poly style illustrations, which have 3D abstract appearance, have become a popular stylish recently. Most previous methods require special knowledges in 3D modeling and need tedious interactions. We present an interactive system for non-expert users to easily manipulate the low-poly style illustration. Our system consists of two parts: vertex sampling and mesh rendering. In the vertex sampling stage, we extract a set of candidate points from the image and rank them according to their importance of structure preserving using adaptive thinning. Based on the pre-ranked point list, the user can select an arbitrary number of vertices for the triangle mesh construction. In the mesh rendering stage, we optimize triangle colors to create stereo-looking low-polys. We also provide three tools for exible modication of vertex numbers, color contrast, and local region emphasis. The experiment results demonstrate that our system outperforms state-of-the-art method via simple user interactions.