Adaptive artistic stylization of images

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel non-photorealistic rendering method which produces good quality stylization results for color images. The procedure is driven by saliency measure in the foreground and the background region. We start with generating saliency map and simple thresholding based segmentation to get rough estimation of the foreground-background mask. We improve this mask by using a scribble-based method where the scribbles for foreground-background regions are automatically generated from the previous rough estimation. Followed by the mask generation, we proceed with an iterative abstraction process which involves edge-preserving blurring and edge detection. The number of iterations of the abstraction process to be performed in the foreground and background regions are decided by tracking the changes in saliency measure in the foreground and the background regions. Performing unequal number of iterations helps to improve the average saliency measure in more salient region (foreground) while decreasing the average saliency measure in the non-salient region (background). Implementation results of our method shows the merits of this approach with other competing methods.