Artistic Paper-cut of Human Portraits: Rendering and Perceptual Studies

The creation of art from photos aims at raising aesthetic perception of human viewers while preserving important contents in the source photos. In this process, two divergent factors are usually manipulated and balanced: likeness/fidelity and aesthetic depictions, since in many situations perfecting one of them compromises the other. Based on this two-factor model, we present a method for rendering artistic paper-cut from human portrait by extracting likeness cues and reproducing them with aesthetic practices. We segment the input photo for the regions of face, hair, and clothes, and extract information from each region: shapes and shadings for facial components, hair flow and shading for hairlines, and shadings and depths for clothes. Then we render the paper-cut by expressing these likeness cues in artistic formats with additive elements, such as hallucinated curves and decorative patterns. Using paper-cut images rendered with different levels of likeness and aesthetic factors, we have also conducted human perceptual experiments to study whether and how these factors affect visual perceptions, and how to manipulate rendering configurations accordingly for desired results. On the aspect of likeness, we observed that human subjects are able to achieve comparable face learning and recognition performances on paper-cut images and their corresponding photos, and their performances improve when more likeness cues are preserved in rendering. On the aspect of aesthetics, subjects usually favor images with moderate levels of decorative curves and patterns which do not submerge the likeness cues. These experimental results verify our likeness-aesthetics model and the rendering algorithm.