Artistic Composition for Painterly Rendering

We present a technique for painterly renderings that follows a decomposition of the canvas into a set of regions and layers (coarse to fine). The regions reflect the spatial arrangement of the composition and the order in which the painting is to be created (typically back to front), and are produced in a way that new strokes only minimally paint over existing ones. Layers reflect the application of tools and are optimized for certain brush sizes. The number of strokes and colors that are needed to represent an input image are minimized by this decomposition, which is good for software, but essential for hardware-based rendering. Our method allows us to apply different painting styles to different regions as well as layers, and to create painterly renderings with more artistic freedom. We demonstrate our decomposition technique on images that are processed using hierarchical segmentation techniques.