Abstract: To achieve painterly stylization for a real image,a new painterly rendering algorithm is proposed in this paper.Firstly according to the characteristics of painterly rendering,we combine an improved bilateral filter with the mathematical morphological operation to construct a pyramid sequence of multi-scale reference images.Then a stroke computing algorithm based on visual saliency is introduced.In this method,face and visual focus detections are first employed to get the salient regions.Based on the obtained salience information,the accuracy of stroke's control point and direction computing is improved,and the painting constraint to texture edge is strengthened.By using the proposed approach,a distinctive effect of painterly rendering that the primary content of the image is finely rendered can be achieved.Experimental results demonstrate that the improved painterly rendering algorithm produces satisfactory visual effects.