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GRAPHITE 2007, Perth, Western Australia, December 1–4, 2007.
© 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-912-8/07/0012 $5.00
Virtual Woodcuts from Images
V.B. Mello
∗
Unisinos - Brazil
C.R. Jung
†
Unisinos - Brazil
M. Walter
‡
UFPE - Brazil
(a) Original Image (b) Segmented Image (c) Orientation Field (d) Woodcut
Figure 1: Example of result from our system. From left to right the original image, the segmented image, the orientation field, and an
automatic result. The details about intermediate images are given in the text (Original Image La Reve,
c
Succession Pablo Picasso, 2007,
by permission from AUTVIS, Brazil, 2007).
Abstract
We present in this paper a technique for synthesizing virtual wood-
cuts based on real images. Woodcuts are an ancient form of art in
which an image is printed from a block of carved wood. Our solu-
tion is fully automatic, but it also allows a great deal of user control
if desired. Given an input image, our solution will synthesize an
artistic woodcut from this image. Previous work on this topic has
mainly relied on simulation of the actual physical interaction pro-
cess between wood, ink, and paper, whereas we present a consistent
solution based on four steps: image segmentation, computation of
orientation fields, generation of strokes, and final rendering. Al-
though some non-photorealistic rendering work could be possibly
extended to approximate woodcut effects, ours is the first consistent
approach targeting woodcuts specifically for images. We illustrate
the potential of the proposed technique with examples of virtual
woodcuts, obtained either automatically or user guided.
CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image
Generation—Miscellaneous
Keywords: woodcuts, expressive rendering, npr
∗
e-mail: vbmello@gmail.com
†
e-mail: crjung@unisinos.br
‡
e-mail: marcelow@cin.ufpe.br
1 Introduction
One of the main sources of inspiration for the advance of computer
graphics techniques, particularly in non-realistic rendering, are art
forms such as oil painting [Lee et al. 2007; Drago and Chiba 2004],
watercolor painting [Curtis et al. 1997; Luft and Deussen 2006],
pen-and-ink [Winkenbach and Salesin 1994], and others [Bleser
et al. 1988; Lee et al. 2006]. Recently, one of these art forms
captured our attention: woodcuts. Woodcuts are a form of ancient
printed art where the final work is obtained by engraving an image
on a block of soft wood and then usually black ink is applied to this
surface. The woodcut image is obtained by transferring the ink onto
the paper. Due to its nature, in its simplest form, the results are usu-
ally a negative binary image. The white areas in the final print are
the parts where there was removal of material and the black areas
are the parts where the wood remained intact.
The technique is very old, dating back to centuries V and VI AD and
was often used as a form of primitive printing in China and Egypt.
Around 770 AD in Japan one million copies of a buddhist religious
book were impressed using woodcut techniques [Ross 1974]. In
spite of being simple, woodcuts can achieve a high degree of ex-
pressiveness, such as the real woodcut shown in Figure 2. Our so-
lution takes as input any image, and outputs a woodcut-like image,
such as the one in Figure 1. This figure also summarizes the steps
in our solution for synthesizing a woodcut.
We first present related work in the next section followed by our
model in Section 3. In Section 4 we illustrate our results. Con-
clusions and possibilities for future work are presented in the last
section.
2 Related Work
Although woodcuts are a reasonably well known art form, they
have not been much explored in computer graphics. In 2001 Sourin
[Sourin 2001] presented a solution to synthesize virtual emboss-
ing and wood cutting using an interactive shape modeler where a
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