User-guided line abstraction using coherence and structure analysis

Line drawing is a style of image abstraction where the perceptual content of the image is conveyed using distinct straight or curved lines. However, extracting semantically salient lines is not trivial and mastered only by skilled artists. While many parametric filters have successfully extracted accurate and coherent lines, their results are sensitive to parameter choice and easily lead to either an excessive or insufficient number of lines. In this work, we present an interactive system to generate concise line abstractions of arbitrary images via a few user specified strokes. Specifically, the user simply has to provide a few intuitive strokes on the input images, including tracing roughly along edges and scribbling on the region of interest, through a sketching interface. The system then automatically extracts lines that are long, coherent and share similar textural structures to form a corresponding highly detailed line drawing. We have tested our system with a wide variety of images. Our experimental results show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of quality and efficiency.