Video Painting with Space-Time-Varying Style Parameters

Artists use different means of stylization to control the focus on different objects in the scene. This allows them to portray complex meaning and achieve certain artistic effects. Most prior work on painterly rendering of videos, however, uses only a single painting style, with fixed global parameters, irrespective of objects and their layout in the images. This often leads to inadequate artistic control. Moreover, brush stroke orientation is typically assumed to follow an everywhere continuous directional field. In this paper, we propose a video painting system that accounts for the spatial support of objects in the images or videos, and uses this information to specify style parameters and stroke orientation for painterly rendering. Since objects occupy distinct image locations and move relatively smoothly from one video frame to another, our object-based painterly rendering approach is characterized by style parameters that coherently vary in space and time. Space-time-varying style parameters enable more artistic freedom, such as emphasis/de-emphasis, increase or decrease of contrast, exaggeration or abstraction of different objects in the scene in a temporally coherent fashion.