Cubist Style Rendering from Photographs

The contribution of this paper is a novel nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) technique, influenced by the style of Cubist art. Specifically we are motivated by artists such as Picasso and Braque, who produced art work by composing elements of a scene taken from multiple points of view; paradoxically such compositions convey a sense of motion without assuming temporal dependence between views. Our method accepts a set of two-dimensional images as input, and produces a Cubist style painting with minimal user interaction. We use salient features identified within the image set, such as eyes, noses and mouths as compositional elements; we believe the use of such features to be a unique contribution to NPR. Before composing features into a final image we geometrically distort them to produce the more angular forms common in Cubist art. Finally we render the composition to give a painterly effect, using an automatic algorithm. This paper describes our method, illustrating the application of our algorithm with a gallery of images. We conclude with a critical appraisal and suggest the use of “high-level” features is of interest to NPR. Keywords— Non-photorealistic rendering, Cubism, Salient features.