Animating Chinese Paintings through Stroke-Based Decomposition
- Songhua Xu ,
- Ying-Qing Xu ,
- Sing Bing Kang ,
- David Salesin ,
- Yunhe Pan ,
- Harry Shum
MSR-TR-2006-33 |
Copyright © 2006 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or [email protected].
This paper proposes a technique to animate a “Chinese style” painting given its image. We first extract descriptions of the brush strokes that hypothetically produced it. The key to the extraction process is the use of a brush stroke library, which is obtained by digitizing single brush strokes drawn by an experienced artist. The steps in our extraction technique are: segment the input image, find the best set of brush strokes that fit the regions, and finally refine these strokes to account for local appearance. We model a single brush stroke using its skeleton and contour, and we characterize texture variation within each stroke by sampling perpendicularly along its skeleton. Once these brush descriptions have been obtained, the painting can be animated at the brush stroke level. In this paper, we focus on Chinese paintings with relatively sparse strokes. The animation is produced using a graphical application we developed. We present several animations of real paintings using our technique.