Apply nonphotorealistic rendering techniques to your own pictures

Many nonphotorealistic rendering techniques exist to produce artistic effects from given images. Their application can simply be for fun (e.g. to make consumer photographs more interesting), but there are also many other applications such as scientific visualisation, film production effects, technical illustration, etc.

Inspired by various artists such as Matisse and Warhol, an attractive nonphotorealistic rendering technique has been developed that uses various computer vision techniques to produce a combination of lines and tonal blocks (black and also white for highlighting) to create an abstracted artistic rendering. Its goal is to achieve a minimal rendering, where the minimum refers to the number of tones as well as the number and complexity of the primitives used for rendering. At the same time, sufficient elements should be retained from the original image to make the results instantly recognisable.

This work was recently presented at the International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR), and a demo page has been provided at http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/npr/ to allow people to upload their own images and try out the nonphotorealistic rendering.

Read more about our research into Visual Computing.