Automatic Generation of Pencil Drawings Based on Multi-level Saliency Maps

Artistic stylization is a kind of techniques that could automatically convert photos to art-style images.It has a board market and a vast potential for future development.Currently,images generated by the existing artistic stylization methods are often of rigid style with stiff strokes.This paper proposed a non-photo realistic image synthesis framework for pencil drawing generation.Based on the multi-level saliency map,the generated pencil drawings are more natural.The method first generated a multi-level saliency map through quantum cut algorithm,which computed a salience probability for each pixel in the photo;then it built models to synthesize sketches,which created strokes of various length,thickness,and orientation according to the saliency level by using the edge tangent flow algorithm;finally,it built models to synthesize tones,which transferred the brightness in gray-scale and performed texture mapping in the level of details.Compared with the state-of-the-art non-photo realistic rendering methods,our method could get more layered and vivid pictures which are closer to real artistic works.Experiments show that the synthesis framework transfer photos to pencil drawings fast and the transferred images have vivid artistic effects.