An Interactive and Generative Approach for Chinese Shanshui Painting Document

Abstract

Chinese Shanshui is a landscape painting document mainly drawing mountain and water, which is popular in Chinese culture. However, it is very challenging to create this by general people. In this paper, we propose an interactive and generative approach to automatically generate the Chinese Shanshui painting documents based on users' input, where the users only need to sketch simple lines to represent their ideal landscape without any professional Shanshui painting skills. This sketch-to-Shanshui translation is optimized by the model of cycle Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). To evaluate the proposed approach, we collected a large set of both sketch data and Chinese Shanshui painting data to train the model of cycle-GAN, and developed an interactive system called Shanshui-DaDA (i.e., Design and Draw with AI) to generate Chinese Shanshui painting documents in real-time. The experimental results show that this system can generate satisfied Chinese Shanshui painting documents by general users.