Mixed Media Painting and Portraiture

This paper presents a technique for mixed media nonphotorealistic painting and portraiture. The goal of this work is to transform digital images into renderings that approximate the appearance of mixed-media artwork, which incorporates two or more traditional visual media. We achieve this by first separating an input image into distinct regions based on the degree of local detail present in the image. Each region is then processed independently with a user-selected nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) filter. This allows the user to treat highly detailed regions differently from regions of low-frequency content. The separately processed regions are then smoothly fused in the gradient domain. In addition, we extend our work to the rendering of mixed-media portraits. Portraits pose unique challenges that we address with our method of segmentation, which is based on a composite of face detection and image detail. Our approach offers the user a great deal of flexibility over the end result, while at the same time requiring very little input. This input takes the form of a few simple and discrete choices. The results demonstrate an impressive array of transformational possibilities.