Image Processing based Image to Cartoon Generation: Reducing complexity of large computation arising from Deep Learning

This paper proposes an approach to convert real life images into cartoon images using image processing. The cartoon images have sharp edges, reduced colour quantity compared to the original image, and smooth colour regions. With the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence, recently deep learning methods have been developed for image to cartoon generation. Most of these methods perform extremely huge computations and require large datasets and are time consuming, unlike traditional image processing which involves direct manipulation on the input images. In this paper, we have developed an image processing based method for image to cartoon generation. Here, we perform parallel operations of enhancing the edges and quantizing the colour. The edges are extracted and dilated to highlight them in the output colour image. For colour quantization, the colours are assigned based on proposed formulation on separate colour channels. Later, these images are combined and the highlighted edges are added to generate the cartoon image. The generated images are compared with existing image processing approaches and deep learning based methods. From the experimental results, it is evident that the proposed approach generates high quality cartoon images which are visually appealing, have superior contrast and are able to preserve the contextual information at lower comnutational cost.