Pencil drawing rendering based on example texture

Abstract

With the development of computer graphics, a number of techniques have been developed to simulate traditional artistic media and styles, such as oil painting, watercolor, cartoon line drawings, etc. Among the artistic drawings, pencil drawing is an important style of visual arts widely used in kinds of media forms. In this paper, we propose a method of translating a natural image into a pencil drawing based on given example pencil texture. First, we get the texture from an example pencil drawing rendering. Then, we segment the target image into several regions with different color and shapes, and get the pencil tone of the target image by histogram matching. For each region, its tone is approximated by the example texture separately to determine the corresponding texture appearance in final pencil drawing. Finally, we generate pencil sketches by adjustable line convolution and combine the sketches and texture of regions together to form the final pencil drawing. It was demonstrated that our method can work better in maintaining the characteristic of pencil drawings and getting the accurate sketches. So our method is more suitable to simulate the hand pencil drawings than previous methods, and it can be extended to generate diverse styles of pencil drawings based on different pencil texture.