Abstract: To address the limitation that the result generated by existing methods looks somewhat washed out because of missing contrast,this paper presents an improved non-photorealistic rendering technique for Abstracting images.A smooth and feature-preserving edge tangent flow field is firstly constructed from the eigenvectors of the smoothed structure tensor.Then an adaptive smoothing operation is performed along the stream lines defined by the edge tangent flow,and after that the difference-of-Gaussians-based unsharp masking is performed in the direction of gradient for enhancing local scene contrast.At last,an improved flow-based bilateral filter or a separable implementation of Kuwahara filter is adopted to achieve the enhanced Abstracted images in real-time.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods in terms of feature preservation and visual appreciation.