Image-Based Rendering for Ink Painting

Ink painting is one of the traditional forms of expression in oriental art and it is fascinating to generate the distinctive ink painting effect using modern non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) technique. Since most stroke-based rendering (SBR) methods require much user interaction and professional knowledge about painting, it should be more convenient to employ image-based rendering (IBR) methods to directly produce the ink wash effect from photos. According to our knowledge, however, most current IBR methods are based on ad-hoc algorithm, and they fail to perform well in generical scenario. In this paper, we propose a new IBR framework for ink painting, which could effectively simulate ink diffusion in absorbent paper, and produce various types of black or color ink painting effects. First, significant edges of the original image are detected as the constraint regions. Second, the pixel values of the edges are propagated to the blank regions out of them using an edge-preserving energy minimization model in edit propagation technique. Third, absorbent paper appearance is simulated through texture synthesis and detail manipulation. Finally, we compose the ink diffusion results with the absorbent paper background to generate the whole ink painting. Experiments illustrate that various types of ink diffusion effects and absorbent paper appearance could be effectively produced by our method.