CraGL: Computational Reality, Creativity and Graphics Lab

PosterChild: Blend-Aware Artistic Posterization

Cheng-Kang Ted Chao, Karan Singh, Yotam Gingold
Computer Graphics Forum (CGF). Special issue for Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2021.

Paper

Supplementary Material

Additional examples and user study data (8 MB ZIP)

Code

GitHub

Artistic Posterizations generated by our algorithm. Our algorithm captures accurate colors and preserves high-frequency details in the original scene, while creating smooth layer boundaries elsewhere. Our posterized layers are defined as blends of an automatically extracted representative palette. This allows artists to create characteristic recoloring effects in real-time by manipulating palette colors after pre-processing by our posterization pipeline. Artistic Posterizations generated by our algorithm. Our algorithm captures accurate colors and preserves high-frequency details in the original scene, while creating smooth layer boundaries elsewhere. Our posterized layers are defined as blends of an automatically extracted representative palette. This allows artists to create characteristic recoloring effects in real-time by manipulating palette colors after pre-processing by our posterization pipeline.

Abstract

Posterization is an artistic effect which converts continuous images into regions of constant color with smooth boundaries, often with an artistically recolored palette. Artistic posterization is extremely time-consuming and tedious. We introduce a blend-aware algorithm for generating posterized images with palette-based control for artistic recoloring. Our algorithm automatically extracts a palette and then uses multi-label optimization to find blended-color regions in terms of that palette. We smooth boundaries away from image details with frequency-guided median filtering. We evaluate our algorithm with a comparative user study and showcase its ability to produce compelling posterizations of a variety of inputs. Our parameters provide artistic control and enable cohesive, real-time recoloring after posterization pre-processing.

The pipeline for our automatic posterization algorithm. The pipeline for our automatic posterization algorithm. Input photo © Darius Bashar.

Presentation

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BibTeX

(publisher page) 

@article{Chao:2021:PosterChild,
 author    = {Chao, Cheng-Kang Ted and Singh, Karan and Gingold, Yotam},
 title     = {{P}oster{C}hild: Blend-Aware Artistic Posterization},
 journal   = {Computer Graphics Forum (CGF)},
 volume    = {40},
 number    = {4},
 pages     = {87-99},
 doi       = {https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14343},
 note      = {Special issue for Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR)},
 year      = {2021},
 month     = jun,
 keywords  = {image stylization, non-photorealistic rendering, optimization, image smoothing}
}